


Growth (The Girl in the Hanging-Tree Remix)

by dodostad, gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eye Trauma, F/M, Gen, Gore, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dodostad/pseuds/dodostad, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five people who wanted to know Terezi's story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. rose lalonde

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Construction (The Girl in the Machine)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/260660) by [everlit (Ink)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ink/pseuds/everlit), [helyorin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helyorin/pseuds/helyorin). 



> With special thanks to [signalbeam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam) for putting up with the, um, _creative process_ that went into this fic's composition.
> 
> All the art here is by Ella; I can frankly but hope that the words do it justice.

**1\. rose lalonde**

 

TT: At the end of our first conversation you expressed your intention to contact me again,  
TT: When I knew more.  
TT: Should I then take your persistent silence as a form of confirmation that my ignorance--  
TT: Though assaulted by the very fires of a nascent green star,  
TT: Diminished by secrets stolen from squirming divinities,  
TT: And bruised by turtle harassment--  
TT: Remains essentially intact?  
TT: Enminden me, Seer.  
GC: ...  
TT: Sorry. My little joke.  
GC: WOW >:[  
TT: It wasn’t a very good one.  
GC: NO TH4TS NOT WH4T 1 W4S WOW1NG 4T  
GC: 4NYW4Y YOU OF 4LL P3OPL3 SHOULD KNOW TH4T 1 GOT D1STR4CT3D FROM TH3 1MPORT4NT T4SK OF H4SSL1NG YOU BY TH3 3V3N MOR3 1MPORT4NT T4SK OF ORCH3STR4T1NG YOUR T34MM4T3S SL4UGHT3R!  
GC: SO WH4T BROUGHT TH1S ON >:?  
TT: I guess I wanted to chat.  
GC: 4BOUT  
TT: Do all troll conversations require a premise?  
TT: (That was rhetorical. I have met Kanaya, after all.)  
GC: H4H4  
GC: GOOD ON3  
TT: Thank you.  
GC: OK4Y SO YOU JUST W4NT TO SHOOT TH3 W34TH3R P4TT3RN  
GC: 1S TH4T WH4T YOUR3 S4Y1NG?  
GC: NO ULT3R1OR MOT1V3S  
GC: NO M4N1PUL4T1V3 R3M4RKS 4BOUT MY CH4R4CT3R  
GC: 4 M1N1MUM OF 3MOT1CONS 3V3N?  
TT: Yes. Yes, quite.  
GC: TH4TS TOO B4D

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] blocked tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

Your first conversation with Terezi Pyrope went something like this: she insulted your mother, you wondered whether she wanted to be friends, she told you you talked too much. She talked too much. She described the most urgently weird aspects of your still minimal Sburb experience with an offhand word and then rambled for paragraphs about the existential futility which at that moment was as remote as the ghost of Earth, and would later consume you. She was not the kind of girl you would have expected to fall in love with your brother, but from the moment they first spoke face to face they clung to one another like children in the dark.

In another timeline, you used to let Dave grill you about her, as if either of you knew anything except that she was the architect of your loneliness. You would make up things. She was malevolent (true), she was charming (not); she bwahaha’d with a white dragon in her lap. She hated you both. “If I could get my hands on her,” said Dave, but as Davesprite he forgave her without much interest and as Dave again he offered her his neck. You see no contradictions, but then, you are an exceptionally perceptive person.

Okay, no. Make that you can be. You could be. You’re almost sure.

TG: so tz says youre stalking her  
TT: A profound exaggeration.  
TT: I’m just following her around and recording her movements.  
TG: wow yeah thank you mme thesaurus  
TG: you are definitely strengthening your case here  
TG: your case is chugging 2% like one million muscular dead dudes  
TT: Ew?  
TG: but seriously whats the deal  
TG: i mean do we need to duel at eternal midnight over her honor or like  
TG: should i just get karkat to add a column to the shipping grid hes got carved on his lungs  
TT: Because you have locked him in your bedroom without any other writable surfaces?  
TG: no because hes a fucking masochist  
TT: I have no designs on Terezi’s virtue.  
TT: Only friendly concern.  
TT: Did you know she subsists primarily on a diet of chalk, textbooks, and TaB?  
TT: Isn’t that weird?  
TG: or you put her off her feed  
TT: It’s possible.  
TT: You know her better than I do.  
TT: She deigned to choreograph at least one of _your_ deaths.  
TG: jfc  
TG: youre so full of shit  
TG: anyway since when is getting alternakilled by someone the number one way to figure out their dietary requirements???  
TT: It depends on the method of murder,  
TT: But I think you’ve got even odds.

Talking to Dave has a way of making you overstate your case. You don’t think Terezi is in a position to eat anyone alive. Maybe it’s just that in a day you came to think of the trolls as powerful, though doomed-- wise, though corrupted by tremorous despair. You were not prepared to find them waiting for you post-apotheosis, like phantoms of a miserable childhood, gathered around a flame.

In truth you never expected them to live. They had resigned themselves to annihilation, and you were too busy trying to prove them wrong about you to prove them wrong about them. But you still remember Aradia’s arrogant bleakness: how she messaged you while you were staring green salvation in the face, and ordered you to close your eyes. How she raged. When at last you all arrived at the body asteroid she was unrecognizable, as if someone had wrenched her open to put a fire out.

She was also dressed like a fairy, but you ascribed that to cultural differences.

And Terezi had stood there too, in her own homemade costume, looking as uncomfortable as anyone wearing teal felt can. Gone was the fey rancor of her introduction; she spoke with embarrassment when at all. She was suffering, it seemed, from a pale cousin to survivor’s guilt. Survivor’s chagrin, make that. Survivor’s bashfulness. Behind her glasses her narrow eyes looked broadly bruised, and their blank gloss of red recalled an aging scar.

You can say all this with certainty, but actually you paid her very little attention. Everyone was talking. Kanaya was glowing. If you thought about her at all, you suppose it would have been with disappointment. The first time you talked to Terezi Pyrope she was absolutely self-assured, made brilliant by sheer impatience. She spoke, not self-consciously, about forever. And though hatefriends was a very stupid word, it did not connote indifference. Yet when you patronized and postured and almost said her name-- she curled from you like an animal: something too freshly hurt to risk itself on teeth.

You were to have been equals. Now, like an animal, you find yourself rooting in the undergrowth for her.

Despite Dave’s paranoia it does not take the form of day to day observation. If you wanted to MST3K Can Town’s development plans you would re-alchemize your crystal ball. You would wile away the hours in a state of titillation that could otherwise be reproduced by watching paint dry, and you would never have to leave your carpet pile. You could make out with Kanaya between sessions, were she not moved to toxic sarcasm levels by your new hobby. Everything would be fine. But political dramas, sad to say, never held your interest.

No; you invite restraining orders by wandering through the empty labs. You look for blood, and only seldom meet her on the site of shedding, her shoulders tight, her hands clasped, the loose lock of her fingers cradled against her spine.

Maybe the problem is that you never quite speak.

Anyway, it’s a big meteor. There are rooms in which you can’t move for vats, glass walls so thick they’re greenish, the insides greener. Floating monsters. Chessmen, except the relationship between chessmen and the things behind the glass is that of birds and dinosaurs. So much of Sburb is oversized. And though its violence should read primeval, you’re pretty sure that-- in this case-- evolution ran the other way.

Many of the vats are broken, of course. In those chambers the floor has grown sleek with spilt slime, and the grotesque mass of every half-grown soldier slumps wet upon its base. Derse, Prospit-- with strange indifference did they place their unripe children, their nursling clones, the ivory nose to nose with the black.

You think you always overestimated the difference, even after examining their libraries and doing cross-checks on their RPF. Or else you simply mistook the symptoms; equated darkness with long words, and insight with destruction. You did not understand what it was like to have knowledge handed to you on a cloud.

Now it is you who is wading through granted certainty, with a sun behind your eyes. There are no moons here, and you are all moving in the direction of unreflected light.

***

There are other aspects to the scenery.

On a wall without a door is written, in familiar brown, “are you next?”-- and then a face, :o), which is less so. You remember his emoticons as bracketed and noseless; his question marks, comma-shaped. Not that there’s any sign, really, of adiosToreador on this wall, or in the continental stains that mar the floor. As you understand it he died before your mother did, his corpse lost beyond recovery by the time yours was aflame.

Before you played the game, you used to worry that one day you would meet John, Dave, or Jade, and be so mystified by their personhood-- their opaque, bodied selves, independent from the limpid psychological wells that were their online characters-- that you would be: horrendous, clumsy. Lost for words. Then, ironically, when you came to meet the trolls, it turned out half the ones you’d talked had left no body at all. Not even ash.

On leaving the room you see Terezi’s shadow in the hallway. This stops you in your tracks.

It’s thrown long against the wall, stretched to legginess by some unsourced illumination. She is standing in profile relative to the glow, and the shadow has her long slight nose, her blunter jaw; her hair’s square shape concealing its descent into her throat.

She’s talking to someone, in a low voice, more emphatically than you have ever heard her. It could be Dave or Karkat, but then you think you would be able to discern their half of the discourse. Also you think there would be a second shadow.

“Of course I don’t regret it!” says Terezi.

You retreat.

What else? Among this rubble of things unmade you find toys, strewn incongruously over the dark red tile. You collect them, after a moment’s thought: you think you recognize the handiwork, and they are, abstractly, precious-seeming, their long snouts noodle-slim, their button gaze suggestive of nakedness contained. Buttoned up dragon brains. Some rent in two, some merely gutted-- they spill their stuffing whitely over everything, like dandruff or light.

***

GA: What Is The Point Of This  
TT: I thought we went over that.  
TT: The shot at triumph, the hope of a future that contains more than advanced crustacean spit bubbles, and perhaps, when the time comes, the resurrection of your race...?  
GA: No That Was The Answer To Rose What Is The Point Of My Continued Stay On This Inhospitable Rock As It Hurtles Through A Dark Realm Full Of Malformed Gods That I Have Always Felt Kind Of Leery Towards  
GA: But My Question Was What Is The Point Of Your New Hobby Of Littering Our Block With Scalemate Scraps  
GA: Scrapmates  
TT: Oh.  
TT: I guess I was thinking of changing my sleeping habits.  
TT: Trying out other soft mounds.  
GA: I See  
GA: What Was Wrong With The Carpet Pile  
TT: Technically, nothing.  
TT: But we experience quite enough rugburn when awake,  
TT: Don’t you think?  
GA:  
GA: This Seems Like A Moment For Modest Ellipses  
GA: So After Some Thought I Will Now Proceed Directly To Their Deployment  
GA: “...”  
TT: _Fabulous._

You dream.

The forest around your mother’s house is as you don’t remember it: more densely detailed than you could hope to render, with your brain and your love. The gods, whatever Kanaya says, are kind. Skaia is very bright and deep, but even as an immortal, it is in the arms of terrors that you’ve found pity.

You are nine years old again. The twigs crunch undersole.

When you were really nine, not just dressed in an out-of-date self-image and pink Mary Janes, you used to go into the woods and play at blackest witchcraft. You tied knit voodoo dolls to low-hanging branches. They were all of your mother, and they had words like “self-actualization”, and, “sobriety”, and, “a good night’s sleep” taped to their woollen chests. Your mother, who was already entangled in Sburb by then: her nights given over to Skaianet, her mouth dry as her sherries, her whole soul burning to end the world for you. Had she ever seen the dolls they would have saddened her. She would have regretted their sloppy weave. “Rose,” she always said, “I can get you anything you want. Don’t worry about me.”

“These are damnation,” you could have told her, “these are curses”-- but she never left the house.

You might look for them now, except you believe that there is someone else in the woods. There’s no reason to presume. You have a dream’s conviction, though. You walk and the trees part for you.

It’s day, behind the screen of leaves: sunshine falling like rope through holes the size of coins. Light laces up the gloom. But the leaves themselves are changing; what were dark needles are grown extravagantly pink, and the rough sweet bark of the black pines has given way to silvery boles.

***

After a while you come across an artifact stranger than the extraterrestrial vegetable.

Your first, inane impression is of a ship-- the silhouette of sails. But the actuality turns out to be an enormous balance, the one scale weighed down by a giant fucking skull, the other by a stone. No. Stone? What are you, Eragon? You know a shell when you see one. Nevertheless, you can’t imagine it being involved in birth.

You go up to it. It hangs far higher your head, but you can fly, and you rise easily. The use of your abilities shades your T-shirt orange, but that’s godhood. Always makes the colors run. Goldclad, then, you press your face to the egg’s side and feel the throbbing coolness of its walls, the delicacy respective to its depth. One eye narrows.

There’s a dragon curled commaish into the ovoid curve. Its narrow chin is tucked to its armored breast, its claws gathered beneath its sternum like a bunch of long-petalled flowers, young and dormant and already dead. It is your eye that casts a light on it, and as your eye moves so shifts the shine, descending from white brow down gaunt cheek to reveal an isolate fang.

When you were twelve you wrote about dragons like this, with faceted jowls and sleek crests of bones to protect their weak eyes; but now, at almost fourteen, you are writing a technical manual whose domain includes everything from magical beasts to suns. You no longer have to make up anything; you only have to guide. You are grateful.

And once, not so very long ago, you went out onto the dock and found your mother gone, her martini clear as a lens and level with your ankles. You gazed out at a turquoise sea and touched your lips to glass. Later she bled out in a castle at the checkerboard nexus of all creative energy, of all hope-- so you know gratitude.

_Whose memory is this?_ \-- as if you haven’t guessed.

***

But when you find her she is somehow still (already) asleep. Her body slack as a knot untied; slack, and remembering strain.

You don’t know for how long you have been running or dreaming. The laughter faded with the afterimage of the dragon. Since then the forest has thinned-- you are standing on the edge of a clearing, where above you foliage gives way to bluish sky. Hemmed in with coral arbory it resembles skin more than air, and the sun opens from out its flat expanse. You could even think, _a dead red eye_. You could think, _with bright rays for false lashes_. But the Alternian sun is a pretty old star-- and, recalling the hot green light you second-came by, you are obscurely shamed, like the girl who received a pony for Christmas and was wearily asked not to name it after a Terry Brooks character, please. You decide not to finish the metaphor.

The thing to remember is, there have been so many girls, only some of them you; and so many of them are now dead, or hopelessly gone. Under the dappling of sun it’s hard to tell which applies to Terezi.

“Hey,” you try. “Wake up.”

She doesn’t twitch. She’s smaller than she has any right to be, her face straight out of elementary school save for the question of color. That thin black mouth. Not that you ever went to elementary school, really, except for weeks that you never can recall. But unlike the Terezi you know from the asteroid, whose physicality was shock enough after so much internet conversation, you can imagine this kid playing tetherball. She has one arm across her narrow chest, the nervous line of wrist hazed out by grass. In the splay of soft fingers flowers tuck their white heads. She looks, in some ways, like her shredded scalemates, but what spills from her lips is nothing more intrinsic than drool.

“Terezi?”

Not a flutter.

You crouch down at her side. Her horns are almost covered by her hair. You could transpose her into the scenes of your childhood, but the truth is she looks finished. Like a still shot from which you are supposed to deduce the beginning and the middle of a story-- a man kills himself over squid soup, and why? Because his brother was a horrorterror.

God, this is stupid.

You shake her. She stays inert. The rise and fall of her ribs describes a deepening arc beneath her shirt. You think, inexplicably, of slapping her, but there is no urgency.

When you peel open her eye, it’s white, anyway. White as an egg.

You put her down again. Her hair flattens out beneath her head, and the skin of her is burnt to a deep teal, but you walk on.

Past the clearing and the thickets of slim trees after it you find yourself among relative giants. They’re not much taller than their earlier brethren, but the trunk of each is so broad you could hardly belt it with five dead Daves. Directly before you rises one with probable aspirations to immortality, although as soon as you think that you begin to wonder uneasily whether there is not after all such a thing as a tree soul, to take root in monstrous soap and nourish itself on the breath of many-armed gods.

Spirit or otherwise, its crown spreads out like fleshy lungs, tissue ribbed with blue branches. You lift your face; a leaf, drifting downwards, lands on one open eye. Somewhere in the pink mass is a window.

"Rapunzel,” you call. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your stair!”

Terezi’s head and shoulders appear over the sill. You accept the stare as homophonic compromise.

“Lalonde?” she says, her eyes carmine, miniscule, and incredulous even at this distance. “What are you doing here?”

“Stalking you?” you offer.

This appears to satisfy her, because a moment later a rope ladder descends. Again you think of ships: you climb and hope the ground won’t turn to sea beneath your feet. Neither of you remarks on the fact that by the time you’ve reached the top, you’ve sprouted a denim jacket (and red shoes). It’s her memory.

She has her elbows on the windowframe, her hands linked under her chin. Around you scalemates swing in a sweet breeze; the lengths of every noose adjudged to ensure that no victim is level with its neighbor. Someone has calibrated these gallows carefully.

Okay. That was a pretty silly thing you just thought. But you are surrounded by a plushie solar system, their soft bodies rotating on strings, and folly loves a fellow, you believe.

“Do I need to invite you in, now?” Terezi is saying. “And if so, would that mean you and Maryam have gotten past third base?”

“No,” you say. “And yes.”

She withdraws, making a face. You hitch yourself up over the wall.

Inside her room is surprisingly beautiful, in the same way that vomit, illuminated by neon, can be beautiful. Scales plate the walls in coruscating array and carpets fur the floor. There are books everywhere. You take a breath: chalk dust, overwhelming, makes you sneeze.

“Welcome,” says Terezi-- not very welcomingly.

Her arms were folded, but now she drops her hands to her sides, the material of her shirt falling straight around her waist. She’s wearing gloves. The rest of her Redglare costume she has abandoned for older digs. She flexes her fingers and you see blood tucked into the red creases of leather, old and slick. In this place it smells for all the world like blueberry rot. “How was your trip?” she asks, gloved.

“I thought I saw you earlier,” you say.

“That wasn’t real,” says Terezi, so definitely that she cannot be speaking in the general, you believe.

“To you, perhaps.”

“To anyone!” says Terezi. “There was never a possibility of her.”

You frown at this remark, which is offensive to your sensibilities as an accidental mistress of chance. “But which timeline--?”

Terezi rubs her palms together. Blood flakes away.

“Okay,” you say, slowly. “Maybe we should start again.”

“That’s the whole point,” says Terezi, in reference you presume to her surroundings, long since burnt; or to her younger self, likewise. Or she’s just making fun of you. You sit down on a stack of textbooks and she offers no objection, although her unguarded eyes follow the motion. So do her nostrils, you suppose.

“Was that your lusus?” you ask: pronouncing the word right, you think, though it feels awkward on your lips. “In the egg?”

“Um,” says Terezi, “yes. You saw her?”

“X-ray built in,” you say, and tap your left eye meaningfully. Terezi flinches a bit. You don’t think she would have, waking, but here reactions are harder to hide-- the substance of you not so different from the sentiment. When she recovers it looks like water stilling.

“That’s cool,” she says.

You put your hands palm-up in your lap. “Would you tell me about her?”

She seems doubtful. In her room the sunlight is safely filtered through leaves and glass, lying like filagree along every bare edge, but Terezi herself is soft, hazy, diffused by the act of illumination. You watch her and she looks away, thinking perhaps of the girl you passed in the forest, or the girl whose overlarge jacket you sport; girls for whom you are both, in some sense, replacements, and as replacements notable mainly in your failure to die.

“All right,” she says. “What do you want to know?”

This gives you pause. “What did she do to you?” you say, having received the pause and swallowed it.

It’s the kind of question you could once have asked any of your human friends without fear of being misunderstood, although the answers might involve other misunderstandings. Dave, Jade, John; they all knew how it was. Your custodian was an enigma, a silhouette, a dispenser of incomprehensible knowledge and, worse, kindness. Your custodian had stupid hobbies. Your custodian wore stupid hats, or labcoats, or collars. You chafed to leave them without wanting to go a place they weren’t. You loved them unavoidably.

“She blinded me,” says Terezi, looking surprised.

You open your mouth. You close it. “Oh.”

“She was the mechanism for my blinding,” she amends, amused. “Vriska was the one behind it, obviously. But you were asking about my lusus.” She reaches up as if to adjust the set of her shades on her nose, and then, realizing that her face is unweighted by any glass, pushes her hair back instead. Her ear is larger than human and more translucent, the pink leaf-dyed light from her window breaking purple where it passes through a net of teal filaments. In fact the curl of her ear makes you think of the leaves; leaves only just gone sere.

“I’m sorry,” you offer.

She makes no answer about how she doesn’t regret it, or about the fact that actually it was a gift! “It’s okay,” she says, blinking once, the progress of her eyelids slow like shade over the face of planets. “The only reason Vriska used her was because my lusus could-- can-- communicate with me telepathically. Compel me.”

“Oh,” you say. In your mind’s eye you see the dragon, quiet, familiar, without apparent force or voice. “I was under the impression Vriska was also psychic.”

“Yeah,” says Terezi, “but she couldn’t control me. Or talk to me, even-- she tried, sometimes, but she just couldn’t get through. She was always going on about how convenient it would be for raids, if we could give each other directions with just a thought, not have to bother about headsets and floaty computers and grubphones in our back pocket. But she couldn’t. To her, I was impenetrable!”

“To her,” you say. “But not to your lusus. I understand.”

“Excellent,” she says, and she smiles like the sun.

No, that’s the actual sun, which has filled the room, too bright to parse, foaming up into your nose and swelling your lungs with bright. You are overwhelmed by its stinging glory, its ultraviolet splendor. How it reminds you of your story’s most recent end!

When you have blinked every green afterimage from your eyes the room is fading, and you’re back in the clearing, Terezi looking at you from over the high shoulder of her own prone form. Here the differences are less observable than they were when you viewed each instance separately; both versions of her seem to waver and to gain solidity from the other. But the girl on the ground is still burning, the flesh of her cheekbone starting to steam, whereas Terezi remains serene, her cool flat skin armored by its own truth against this golden memory’s warm deceit.

You are beginning to inkle at what she means by impossibilities.

She puts her hand on her younger self’s cheek, and her sleeping doppelganger stirs, moans, in some empty resistance to a waking long since forced. For your part, you remember that in the doomed timeline, you spent four months thinking of all the things that you would tell yourself if you could. You had little else to do.

“Terezi, did you really hate us?” you ask now, your mind circling unstoppably back to a conversation you had before anyone you knew had died, or splintered, or pieced themselves together from information that was transmitted through the routes of oblivion. At the time you had dismissed her assertion almost as soon as she made it, so sweet did she turn when given the chance to exposit, yet now it seems serious, paramount, a rational concern. Did she really hate you? Did she stop? As with all loss the prospect alarms.

But Terezi is shaking her head. “I never hated anyone,” she says-- a little grimly, but with a look on her face of growing wonder; like a sinner who, having confessed, realizes that they’ve found at last their chance to stray anew.


	2. dave strider

**2\. dave strider**

 

GC: BUT 4R3 YOU SUR3 TH3Y N33D PROT3CT1ON?  
TG: are you kidding me  
TG: of course they need protection  
TG: from themselves if no one else  
TG: i mean look at egbert he trusted you to lead him into the lions den  
TG: that says a whole fucking lot right there  
GC: D4V3 1 4M HURT!  
GC: 4R3 YOU 1MPLY1NG THAT YOU DONT TRUST M3  
TG: babe i dont trust you as far as i can throw lohac  
TG: ive read snow white i know those are razor blades in those apples  
GC: WH4TS 4N 4PPL3?  
TG: only the most deliciously juiceable fruit known to man  
TG: red round and ripe for crushing into a sugarsome pulp  
GC: OH  
GC: SOUNDS F4M1L14R >:]  
TG: and you wonder why i dont want you near my eyes

She is exactly like Rose. She is nothing like Rose.

Rose, born to luxury and hella pink shit, gravitated from birth towards the dark, like a compass needle (two) swinging round to some obscene north. Rose would have led every old-timey polar expedition through shipwreck and glacierfailure if Santa Claus had only thought to keep tentacles under his belt. Or, you guess, if he had typed all in white.

Terezi doesn’t get hot for monsters. Not the ones with more than two legs. Neither did she ever learn to treat wallowing like the Olympic Cup sport it is. If anything, she’s kind of nauseatingly upbeat-- faced with her own inevitable defeat and still sure of the worth she lost. Sure of her goals, not because they were poured into her ear by calamari cupboys, but because she believes in creation, and people, and games. As far as you can tell she always hunted humanity. Humanoidity?

Put like that, they could be Coke and Pepsi. But Rose isn’t the only one who can tear into ice.

GC: T3LL M3 4BOUT YOUR BROTH3R!

She skips all the niceties, the questioning your cool cred or your raps or your manly and heterosexual interests, in favor of digging down into the bloodnasty bed of your fear. No bullshit therapy sessions, either: just her and a tablet pen and a total impatience for transparency and obfuscation both. You say, you want to get your hands on this luscious butt fiesta. She says, I don’t understand. Laughs like a little kid, because she gets the meaning and not any of the words.

It doesn’t bother you. You never took an oath that said your friends of years should know you better than your fairy godtroll of an afternoon.

So you wonder about her, and who she practiced on before coming to open you up like a pig, but you don’t wonder hard. She tells you so much, anyway, that it seems sort of pointless to speculate-- you’re not really one for asking more than you’re given. Sometimes you could stand to get a hell of a lot less.

Though that doesn’t stop you from picking, through the long sidequests and the crocodile scams. They’re all fun to fuck with, these rubber foreskin aliens with their hand-me-down scifi lingo, their rage boners, their obsessive attempts to rile you. It’s like because they were raised Klingon they don’t know indifference from true love, and if you aren’t running in abject terror from their shitty rhymes or shittier comics then serendipity must have rooted you to the spot. They never suspect that you could just be-- bored, of their grandstanding, and of their deaths always two steps behind them. That you could have no desire to harm them, and no real desire to help.

TG: question  
GC: SHOOT  
TG: the consorts right  
TG: these mega gullible suckers who i am even as we speak turning inside out and harvesting the organs of  
TG: shelling out kidneys like cheap cigars  
GC: Y3S WH4T 4BOUT TH3M  
TG: thought you said they were wise  
TG: like dumb but wise beneath the inanity veneer  
GC: YOUR PO1NT B31NG...?  
TG: my point being ive been digging for a day now nonlinear  
TG: and i aint seen no glint of savvy  
GC: M4YB3 TH4T 1S B3C4US3 YOU H4V3 B33N BUSY R3LOC4T1NG TH31R MON3Y?  
GC: H3 WHO W1SH3S TO L1N3 H1S PLUSH POCK3TS W1TH L1Z4RD R1CH3S C4NNOT 4FFORD TO L1NG3R TOO LONG ON S3NT1M3NT!  
TG: uh  
TG: pretty sure you were the one who told me to milk them for every boondime, yo  
TG: dont tell me youre having second thoughts about joining the mafia GC: 1 D1DNT S4Y TH4T  
GC: 1 4M 4S 34G3R TO M4K3 MYS3LF ON3 W1TH YOUR HUM4N CR1M3 SYND1C4T3 4S 3V3R  
GC: BUT DO YOU D3NY TH4T MOST OF YOUR 1NT3R4CT1ONS W1TH YOUR PL4N3TS POPUL4C3 H4V3 B33N 4T B3ST SUP3RF1C14L  
GC: 4ND 4T WORST DOWNR1GHT  
GC: F1N4NC14LLY M1SL34D1NG???  
GC: >:]  
TG: ok im not sure why thats a thing that requires triple qs and wide bracket smiles  
TG: but yeah i guess  
GC: 1S 1T R34LLY TH4T SURPR1S1NG TH4T YOU WOULD TH3N ONLY H4V3 S33N TH3M 4T TH3IR LOW3ST 4ND L34ST M34N1NGFUL  
GC: JUST 4S TH3Y H4V3 ONLY S33N YOU 1N 4T YOUR MOST 1LL3G4L  
TG: the difference being that unlike kool-aid popping alligators i ooze cool even when committing major bank fraud  
TG: maybe especially then idk  
TG: also being that unlike me they werent guided to douchebaggery by some pushy xenomeister in another universe  
TG: no sir these boys are the real thing 100% scaly dumbfuck  
TG: no assembly required  
GC: WHY D4V3 >8O  
GC: DO 1 SM3LL 4 QU4LM?  
TG: no fuck that  
TG: im just saying like what exactly am i dealing with here do these guys have private lives and culture and internet memes or  
TG: are they basically just a bunch of game constructs to help me out  
GC: YOUR M1ST4K3 L13S 1N 4SSUM1NG TH4T TH3Y C4NT B3 BOTH  
TG: obviously  
GC: OBV1OUSLY!  
GC: BUT M4YB3 1T WOULD B3 MOR3 H3LPFUL FOR YOU TO TH1NK OF TH3M  
GC: 4S B31NG B4S1C4LLY UND3V3LOP3D?  
GC: TH3Y OCCUPY 4 WORLD SM4LL3R 4ND MOR3 UN1FORM TH4N YOURS  
GC: TH3 D3T41LS OF TH31R UN1V3RS3 W3R3 TOO 3XP3NS1V3 TO F1LL 1N  
GC: TH3Y 3X1ST 3V3N WH3N YOU 4R3NT FUCK1NG 4ROUND W1TH TH3M BUT  
GC: SUCH KNOWL3DG3 4ND POW3R 4S TH3YV3 GOT 1S 4LW4YS GO1NG TO B3 L3SS US3FUL TO TH3M TH4N TO YOU

She guides you easily.

***

And yeah, maybe you enjoy it: the yappy living walkthrough who did this all backwards and forwards a billion years before you ever existed, who’s seeing you through for motives so selfish and petty that you barely even have to feel grateful. Maybe it makes you feel safe, in ways that even being propelled forward by your own codependent futures can’t, because she shapes you without shadowing you; offers you a way out from under every protective wing anyone’s every draped over your head. Man or ghost.

Does that mean you deserve the other part? Standing over your limeswaddled double with a sword straight out of Evangelion in your hand and literal bedrock at your feet, the collar of your casual T prickling in a red ring round the base of your throat? You wipe sweat off your nose and cheek with your long sleeve and the smudge is red on red. It was okay, stepping into the shoes and hats and glasses of the Daves you’d already glimpsed. For a while. The future receding from you like a tide moving to the music of a blind red moon. But this isn’t an issue of preserving the timeline with a thumbs-up, a head down, a little fraternal, suiternal solidarity-- this isn’t the end you wanted to reach, the point from which you thought freedom would expand outward, like a blossoming globe, the loops of time unwinding from a sphere of choice and light.

I never made it, says Terezi. Of the prize she dangled in front of you like a carrot or a hanged man’s hood. None of them did, apparently, except the girl she hates, envies, can’t stop talking about. Luck doesn’t actually matter.

Read: neither do you.

You just didn’t expect it, you think. Almost three days of not being surprised by anything, because you’d watched yourself not be surprised by it from behind, and then, hey, this alien spirit mentor is nothing of the kind. Something else entirely. Bleak as her whole Margaret Atwood-style cultural landscape is, it was never there to complicate your origin story. For her your value culminated in a pointless scheme that made her feel powerful and made you feel kind of nauseous. That’s all. That’s everything.

Earlier, your brother died and you listened to her talk. She didn’t sound like a joke any longer, even though her voice was coming out of a pair of sunglasses two feet away from your head. When she pestered you for the first time ever-- almost a year before the game-- you thought she was young, or a little stupid, her enthusiasm violent but no less sincere because of it. Her calm acceptance of anything that wasn’t an outright lie.

For her it was only a few hours ago. But now, finally, you know the difference between someone looking to wile away the last dregs of their life, and a creature for whom you are a promised guy, a prophecied conman, the only reason that crocodiles would even have a stock market. You wonder whether it’s turned out that way with spidergirl too; if Vriska, reputedly obnoxious, hungry, and proud, thought she would be Terezi’s big conquest, the weird kissy hate pinnacle of her career as a pretend lawyer-- anything, really, besides one more made-up task for Terezi to take care of before death.

You step off the bed, onto less solid ground. You take the stairs down. You could stay, and finish it, but you’ve got no real interest in seeing how this story ends.

***

It’s weird. Being on the asteroid, after.

Not the most perspicacious thought ever to roam your noodle, in the time since you arrived. But then you’re not exactly talking about the fact that there are test tubes mounted on the walls, or part where you and Rose are here but Jade and John aren’t, and instead you’re marooned, fresh off the top of your most hellacious triumph, among people who by and large you don’t know and god knows don’t resemble. You’re commenting on a specific weirdness. You think of it as asteroid-weirdness because it’s simpler to talk where than it is to talk when. Anything, actually, is simpler than mapping out the course of time: how it burned you, how it burned them. So much questing-- following through on every scheme for personal growth, and in the end all you learned out of it was silence, awkward and unshakable, a quiet that fills your head when you so much as try and think about your power.

Also she’s been watching you like you’re gonna light yourself on fire.

“So,” you say, on day four of the year 0 CE (Can Era).

The two of you crouch next to City Hall; a majestic edifice built from Terezi’s favorite legal dictionaries and hella Faygo husks. You mean cans. The Mayor should be here too, but he’s still recovering from having his stomach made surprise uranium mine, so you’ve come to the mutual decision to forgive his delinquency.

In his absence you’ve also grown daring. Terezi is on all fours, her nose perilously close to knocking out a key support column with one connoisseuring twitch, but she jerks away from it when you speak up.

“So?” she says, raising her eyebrows and her upper lip a little, too, the tips of her teeth bared. Then she sighs. “I wish we could arrange for a mighty dome,” she says, wistfully.

“If Rose would lend us one of her bras--” you say, and then, “no. No, okay, no. You are not derailing my super serious conversational opener by targeting my dudely weakness for hemispheres.”

“Very well.” Terezi sits back on her haunches. Her hands, heavy on her thighs, splay out like spiders. “I will graciously permit your gab gambit to keep its rail!”

She holds her shoulders are tenser than her vowels. You look away.

“Oh,” she sighs. “Are we doing this now?”

“Well,” you say, “it’s not like you’ve taken your nostrils off me since I got here--” trying for a joke, but she seems to take it as grave.

“Haven’t I?”

Dave Strider does not backpedal, unless he’s doing so in defiance of temporal flow. “Sure. Olfactory trained on this hot slice of cherry pie from the moment it touched down. Mind abuzz behind bunched proboscis, yeah? Unspoken shit needs air, you know.”

“Of course,” she says, flatter than any mesa, her voice a geographic blank. “I’ve been staring at you the whole time. Because I am so obsessed with you, I just can’t stop thinking about you.” She says it like you haven’t spoken a word to her until now, like you’ve done anything except sit and let her sketch out chalk shenanigans for you, this whole time. Just like that, you’re pissed, too: mad that she’s making it question of anger, when you were both doing fine running on cool camaraderie and a pinch of denial. You could have talked about this a little bit sideways and made a lot of really hilarious jokes, but no. Given the excuse, TZ’s gotta drag it over to the exposed nerve, which, as when you started out, is a matter of debt.

This is going to suck.

“Sounds about right,” you say.

She laughs. “And you don’t care,” she says.

You roll a stick of chalk between your fingers and it coats your thumb with dust.

“Any minute now,” Terezi continues, “you are going to whip out one of your Earth metaphors--” you almost interject, because hell if Karkat didn’t refer to you as ‘the swinebeast who ate pearls and then was exploded from within’ the other day, which is about as aphor as it gets, but she’s already speeding ahead “--just to make it perfectly clear to me how much you don’t care.”

“Hey. Did I ever suggest that you did?” you say, for lack of a rebuttal that doesn’t implicate. And maybe she’s right, after all, to sign off on metaphors as an export from humanity, because trolls-- they seem to think that if you mean a thing you mean it to the exclusion of all else.

Terezi looks at you askance. Her skance all gone and run off for its honeymoon with her ability to relax.

“If not, you were behaving with foresight! Because I don’t,” she says. “Care.” And, in a rush: “Nor do I care that you don’t care.”

There is a silence like somebody’s tongue has been ripped out.

She looks so furious that it can’t just have come on, you think, ignoring the fact that your own case of peeve went from 0 to 60 in about five seconds, because Terezi’s not-- of the two of you, she’s not the one who does a balletic faceplant into righteous rage. Vengeful wrath is her garden, her mountain spring, her whatever-- a long time building, a long time owed.

Except five minutes ago she seemed so tired. It makes you want to shake her until she pulls back the curtain; shows you her whole automated temper, with its cold gears.

“Is that seriously a thing you just said,” you ask, instead. Terezi looks miserable.

“Yes,” she says.

“Jesus,” you say. “Two loci of apathy and dignity, right? That’s us. Any minute now we’re going to high five.”

She stands up. This is too easy a word for the motion, but she rises, anyway.

“I’ll just,” she says, and you get up too, not even thinking about it; you get in her way, and she pushes you up against the wall with one hand. Her fingers fist in your shirtfront, curling in until she seems sewn to you at the wrist-- after which, with immediacy, she lets go. You straighten, and she runs.

***

When you find her again she’s in tears.

It would be jarring as all hell, except it turns out when a person cries they’re still, inescapably, that person, and Terezi cries like herself. Her face is screwed up like cloth wadded over an injury.

“Leave me alone,” she says, preciser than should be possible with a clogged nose and throat. “Just go!”

You think about it. Then you sit down, next to her, your cape bundled under you. “Nah,” you say, stretching out your legs. And, kind of whimsically, you add, “I get it, you know?”

She looks at you. Confusing, to think that that’s not enough, that you can be so close and she can smell you not on a monitor but in every whole limb, and it does not goddamn suffice.

“I get it,” you say again. “Why you did what you did.”

This catches her off guard. Her mouth twists. “Tell me, then,” she says, soft as tenterhooks.

You look at her.

On a level with her, now, her hair covering her ears and her eyes blubbery with tears, like fat laid bare. In a day she found out everything about you, practically, as much as she could possibly know. She was bored. Once she finished that, something else had to be done.

Could be, too, that she was lonely. That having left behind her batshit friends and tiny, jealous boyfriend, the people she could no longer save-- she wanted to do something for which she could be thanked.

“You’re pretty smart,” you say, when the silence is sufficiently pregnant with squirming maggotspawn. “Crouching chalkgirl, hidden genius.”

She turns her shiny stare downwards, and you regret, for a moment, that she has no idea that you are referencing dragons right now.

“And sometimes-- when you’re really smart, you forget that you can do stupid crap,” you say.

You’re not done, but she interrupts, and then you are. “Was it stupid?”

Her face is near and crisp. Her ruined eyes don’t blink.

“Dumbest thing you ever did,” you say, and watch something pass over her face, like sour relief.

“All right,” she says. “Then do you forgive me?” This last neither coyly or skeptically, but in the tones of someone with a question to which they don’t yet know the answer.

Your first, fast instinct is to say there’s nothing to forgive. Not that you weren’t (aren’t) pissed off; not that she was doing the right thing; but-- since then you’ve done so much. Got shot for breeding frogs and made a god for setting yourself on fire. And how can you blame her? when none of you knew what you were doing after all, when she was wrong about almost everything and you’ve forgotten why you ever thought she was right. The time from your first death to your second you lived in a rush of forward motion, no circling at all, and without yourself to catch up with you came, you think, pretty far.

But she didn’t. She did things, too, after fucking up with you; but killing justly probably isn’t like dying heroically-- it doesn’t let you climb a ladder rung to pixellated enlightenment. It doesn’t let you transform, or shuck off some of your weakness. And even though, as far as you can tell, she did everything with her own teammates correctly, exactly as correctly as she didn’t do it with you-- she got nothing out of that deal but blood. She has yours on her hands, of course; plus John’s, and her hate sister’s and the yellow aftersmears of her B&W friend, and meanwhile you’ve got, what? None, in fact; not even, after all that talk, your own.

“Yeah,” you tell her. “I forgive you.”

She takes a long, wet breath. She sucks in snot and tries to smell you, but you know, really, that she can’t see anything but red, muted and darkening through the remains of her regret. You lean closer. Can she smell you at all beneath the bizarre flavor haze? It’s funny to think about, the original purpose of her senses rewired and then stomped out by greater need.

Disbelieving she says, “You’re... okay?” She ducks her head, and--

Okay.

You could say something, here, about not knowing how the kiss happens. But all you have to do is close a gap. So you do.

Terezi kisses back, bonily. Her skull seems concentrated behind her mouth. You can feel her teeth through her lips, and then, when her mouth slips open, behind them.

You used to know how to make a judicious retreat, to reverse everything in the name of victory. You had the reset button, the internal clock, the deadlines like lasers to dodge beneath. Now, she’s the one who breaks away.

Somehow your hands ended up in her shirt. Your palms, though, are slippery as they were when you held a sword, and she shakes them easily. Like a weapon abandoned she stares up at your face.

“Dave, you’re allowed to be mad,” she says, while you try to wipe saliva off your chin.

She speaks without much hope. Or, you think, in a flash of frustration, relevance. You’re not mad. You’re shaking, yeah, but that’s not the same thing. Some guys, melee fighters and bomb victim alike-- they lose limbs and shit, have to live forever with the phantom of their toes. You’re not like that. All you’ve got, hanging onto you, is phantom inadequacy. The shame of it abruptly and unexpectedly severed from your guts, and the resultant stump cauterized by starspit; none of that stops you from remembering its shape, or the space it occupied inside your outline.

You tell her. “I’m not mad.”

“Sure,” says Terezi, and laughs a little, and then frowns. She is no longer stiffly upright, but slumps, invertebrate, against the wall. You drape your cloak over her, and though she doesn’t accept it she doesn’t brush it off either. Weird; that Terezi should end up the one who you might almost be able to defend, if only from the person you were, and his vindictive vulnerability, and how much she must have liked him, in pieces, on the ground.

***

This is later. Good to clarify that shit now that ‘later’ means the one thing only for everyone you talk to. Late.

“I want to show you something,” is her intro, as it was in the very beginning. Though you don’t have many IM convos now, each preferring some benefit not found in text-- visibility, or warmth.

You wonder whether she’s managed to alchemize a gif, but she doesn’t take you to the alchemitization rooms. Instead she leads you up, onward, through level after level of buried labs until at last you’re on the surface of the asteroid. Above it, in fact, standing on the raised platform that’s its only major external feature besides craters. The platform itself is undistinguished by anything more overwhelmingly snazzy than the transportalizer you arrived by.

Terezi rummages around in her sylladex.

“I’m sure I have it in here,” she says, when she notices you looking impatient. “It’s just a little hard to-- aha!”

The telescope springs out in true baboon phallus style, clattering three-legged onto the deck. “Huh,” says Terezi. “Captchaloguing.”

You share a wordless moment of despair over the actual, legit fact of captchaloguing. Then she occupies herself with adjusting the scope, her nose pressed up against the lens and her eyes shut like lips against a secret or a bluff. Her long hands slide up satiny metal, and you remember Jade, with a gun, in her own land, facing an enemy who loved her despite himself.

“Got it,” she says, and moves to one side: to make way for you.

You step forward.

It’s not even a lens, you discover. Just some sort of grill and the whirr of circulating air inside the tunnel, and all you see when you put your eye to it is some rotating blades.

Your error is made more fully known to you when Terezi whacks you across the back with her cane.

“Not like that, stupid!” she says. “It’s a smelloscope.”

You stare at her over the tops of your shades. She scowls.

“Just try it.”

Reluctantly-- what, is a steel tube going to do in a minute the work that took a magical dragon years, and teach you to synaesthete with eyes wide open?-- you bend to get your sinuses better access to the grill. Still, there’s really nothing, just the faint smell of tin and stale air. You almost give up then, except you can see her, can’t you, out of the corner of her eye, her expression more anticipatory than exasperated, her cheek hollowed out like she’s chewing on it from the inside. She’s doing this as part of her campaign to make it up to you, you’re pretty sure; even though you haven’t decided whether there’s an it to make up, and even though your hands are steady on your knees. She wants to wear you down.

You kind of think knowing this should make you more inclined to pull back rather than less. But you squash your nose up a little more forcefully against the smellescope’s near end, and after a moment’s thought you close your eyes, too: to block out the dark.

“Well?” says Terezi.

“Gonna need to reverse-engineer a sightoscope, babe,” you say, but you’re there, with your face jammed against an instrument of observation that doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. And, after another moment of suspended breath, you catch a bare bright whiff of far-off salt. Something like blood, but older, you think. Old as shit. You don’t know what to make of it. All else aside, you realize you’re not even sure what it could be. Horrorterror crotch, maybe. But not Prospit, or Skaia, or any straightforward moment of light. There is so much that’s gone.

“It’s a dream bubble,” says Terezi, speaking too quickly. “Someone’s memory--”

She stops. You glance at her, then close your eyes again. She really does sound like Rose sometimes. It’s not a comparison you care to examine as much now, because Rose has changed, and you’ve changed, and in many ways she’s stilled. But here she is-- not turning your head, just pointing your nose down a trail.

In truth, you’re kind of fascinated. A dream bubble? An afterlife? Now you know that you’ve left Sburb’s mythological shit behind. It’s so slight, this salt tang, such slim evidence-- but undeniable, too; you could be on a mountaintop that was once covered by sea, and finding the small clean bones of shellfish, carved into softer stone.


	3. karkat vantas

**3\. karkat vantas**

 

You know of Terezi long before you ever say two words to her.

She’s Sollux’s friend, mainly, though she talks to Kanaya too, and at one point Aradia corners you in an empty chatroom and shakes you down for any info you’ve got on “GC’s” gaming history-- absolutely squat, thank god, or you’d never have gotten out of that conversation before Troll Chris Hansen showed up on your doorstep. But Sollux thinks a lot of her. Likes her more than he likes you, probably, because she isn’t an unmitigated asshole to him every time they talk, or maybe just because he has the taste and discernment of a dead barkbeast. Says she’s cool, even. Whatever the hell that means.

So it pretty much follows that you start talking to her, when you finally do, not because Kanaya thinks you’ll Get Along Like A Domestic Conflagration, or even because Aradia is back to recruiting for girly death hijinks; but because at the ripe old age of five Sollux starts trying to do the world a favor and off himself in earnest. Or maybe he’s just tired? He stops responding on Trollian, deletes his showoff hacker blog, and sleeps through every night in apparent hopes of growing enough toxic armpit mold to make his own neighbors pitch him out the window. He rots like a champion perishable.

Maybe a better friend would leave him to it. From your perspective, though, this is an unacceptable proposition. The world doesn’t need any fucking favors. The world is up to its ample chins in gracious concessions. The world deserves to live a long time with the blemish of Sollux Captor on its glistening cheek.

GC: SO W3R3 4GR33D?   
CG: SURE.   
CG: ALL ABOARD THE SAVE-HACKER-ASS TRAIN, WOO WOO, NOW DEPARTING DUMB CONSPIRACY STATION.   
CG: WHILE WE’RE AT IT LET’S ACT LIKE WE’RE ON SOME KIND OF SUPER SERIOUS PARRYLEGAL MISSION BECAUSE WE’RE ACTUALLY WIGGLERS WHO ARE UNABLE TO SEPARATE TRUTH FROM FANTASY.   
GC: >:[   
GC: TH3R3S NO N33D TO B3 RUDE   
GC: 1 JUST TH1NK 1T WOULD B3 B3TT3R 1F W3 D1DNT SPR34D TH1S 4ROUND   
GC: H3 1S B4S1C4LLY 4SK1NG TO B3 CULL3D H3R3!   
GC: WOULDNT W4NT 4NYON3 TO G3T 4 BR1GHT 1D34   
CG: LIKE ANYONE WE KNOW HAS THE GUTS.

There’s a pause.

GC: M4YB3 NO ON3 YOU KNOW DO3S!

You will think this is musclebeast shit. You will be sure of it, in fact; though not for very long.

***

But, all menacing toolery aside, you only meet her once during that whole nervous perigee. You live far closer to Sollux, and so you get the bulk of the care-and-feeding shifts, going three, four nights a week to cram nourishing grubmeat down his ungrateful suckpipe while Terezi plays mission control from the safety of her bush castle. Sometimes. Sometimes she’s as dead silent as Sollux over Trollian, busy wrangling her collection of possible-murderers.

It’s one of those mornings, actually, when she shows up, after hours of ignoring your messages; knocks on his door like a murderer herself, or so you think, briefly, freezing in the shadow of your blood. But: “Karkat?” she says, mispronouncing your name a little, and it’s always been your presumption that when the drones finally get you it won’t be by fucking name.

Sollux is asleep in his coon. You open the door.

She’s smaller than you expected, though taller than you-- but skinny, as a whipping-branch, brittle from throatstem to sole. Not like Sollux, who’s gone rubbery with weight loss: Terezi would probably turn to dust before she figured out how to buckle. And she came dressed in full FLARPer’s gear, her hair bound back from her narrow face, her cut-glass shades slung low on her long nose. The lawyer schtick is stupid but she looks so solemn, standing just outside the doorway in full cosplay gear, that for a moment you feel dizzy, like to run.

“How is he?” is not, as you halfway expect, her first question. Instead she asks, “Do I have any blood on my face?”

You almost choke on your tongue.

“What the _fuck_ \-- Terezi?” Without really thinking about it you push outside, closing the door behind you, so that you’re stranded alone in the hall with her. To compensate you glare.

She thinks this is hilarious. Her lips part for the scythe’s-edge of her grin. “Just answer the question, CG!”-- this dancingly, in a voice that pours ragged off the flicker of her tongue.

You scan her up and down. There is, come to think of it, a weird scrubbed look to the skin under her jaw, but you can see no clinging droplets of tell-tale color, nor even any flushing, blue green beneath the grey. Her irides are as unhued as your own. “No,” you say, finally, “would you look at that, you’re all viscera-free,” and her expression goes smooth. Exhausted, you think, suddenly; too tired to sustain psycho good cheer.

“Thank you,” she says. “Maybe on my next campaign I’ll remember to bring a mirror along.”

You have no idea what that is supposed to mean. You have no idea why she cares; it’s not like Sollux is going to notice. He’s been doing better, kind of, but he’s definitely not at the stage where he might actually get freaked out by corpse residue. Not for the first time, you feel a twinge of envy that has less to do with his talents and more to do with his weakness, which, so far from yours, takes the form of suave subsentience rather than pantshitting terror. You wonder what caste it was, the troll she killed-- yellowblood, maybe? Would that explain it? You’ve been talking to her every night for weeks, not much time but it can feel that way on the internet where it’s not so obvious what else there could be to know, what’s been left unsaid. Easy to see the words as their own whole things and without some teeth behind.

“Nice to meet you,” she adds, “in the flesh.” Her eyes slide onward; past you, to the door.

You let her pass. What else are you meant to do? She’s not something a schmuck like you can guard against. You don’t even listen, although you want to, desperately, almost the minute you have turned your back.

***

Half a sweep later, Sollux is better. Everything else is worse.

Nepeta, of all people, tells you that Aradia’s dead. A day after. As far as you know they didn’t even talk. You and Aradia didn’t talk either, much. You used to get queasily jealous just looking at her text color, which was stupid, since it’s not like you wanted to be a rustblood, did you? What kind of miserable, desperate, chronically and chromatically uncategorized fuckskull would want to be a rustblood?

Well, no risk of shitheap covet now. You sit with your head against the tank of the load gaper for three hours and don’t vomit once.

Then you go and see Sollux.

By rights he should be worse than he ever was when the only thing fucking him over was his giant mutant brain. You’ve read about people who killed their own moirails, the ultimate failure of pacification, how afterwards they come up with gruesome, showy ways to hurt themselves. Or other people. You’ve watched Troll Chris Hemsworth cover himself with anachronistic gasoline after his secret post-mortem pap failed to rouse Precipitation Grey, the beautiful heir to the Condesce’s throne who took her name from her futile but personally inspiring attempts to disguise her fuchsia veinsmears. And he hadn’t even fed her the poisoned fruit that culled her! Just didn’t manage to stop it from happening, with all his huntsmanly stubble. Poor guy. You never really liked the original story of Precipitation Grey, but the dark, edgy movie made you feel the shipping possibilities like never before. You’ve always had a soft spot for reboots.

Despite the palpable absence of a restart button on hand, Sollux looks hungover and sleepless; he doesn’t look bereft. There’s a crust of honey riding the skin around his mouth.

“I’m busy,” he snapped when you kicked open the door, then relented before you could unleash a sparkling fountain of liquescent fury all over his block. Coward. “Fine, whatever, come in--” like you weren’t already over the threshold, barreling across the honeygross carpet between you and his desk.

“Douchebag,” is his greeting now. “Don’t block my light.”

“Your _eyes glow_ , shitskull,” you say; and he smiles, grimly, his fangs decrowded by the stretch of his lips.

You are reminded that you are not actually here to comment on his color-coded deformities. You came to be his friend. Never mind that it doesn’t seem like he needs a friend, or anything else. You lean over the bone crest of his shoulder to see what he’s working on, and would you look at that, it’s incomprehensible, a flashing medley of green and white.

“What is this?”

He hits enter, and looks triumphant. The screen goes black.

“I’m patching TZ through to the man on the moon,” he says. “Kind of slipshod, but she said she wouldn’t take long.”

“The who?”

Sollux looks incredulously at you over the tops of his glasses. “Does it matter? She says she can get back at Vriska this way. I wasn’t about to piss myself over a weird IP.”

Oh.

“Oh,” you say. “Oh, good.” You rock back on your heels, and his shoulders hunch.

But it’s not good. There’s no update from Terezi, after the link closes and Sollux’s computer resumes functioning normally. Sollux gets up and starts to pace, the rangy inverse of his former sloth. You watch him swing his arms like a numbfuck, and feel incredibly small.

“What’s she going to do?” you ask.

Sollux presses his forehead against the window, hard, his horns just short enough that the tips barely scrape. In the glass his reflection is shot with blue. “I-d-k,” he says, the asshole. His breath puffs quick and silent through half-bared teeth; solidifies opaquely, on the pane.

***

CG: HOLY SHIT, IT’S YOU.   
CG: I THOUGHT MY CHUMPDUMP WAS FREE OF YOUR FANGY ONLINE MIASMA FOREVERMORE.   
CG: WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?   
GC: 4T MY H1V3   
GC: 1 H4V3 L1V3D TH3R3 FOR F1V3 SW33PS NOW YOU DONT N33D TO WORRY 4BOUT M3 CH4NG1NG TH3 4DDR3SS   
CG: YOU NEVER TOLD ME YOUR FUCKING ADDRESS.   
GC: NO, 1 GU3SS 1 D1DNT   
GC: WH4TS UP, K4RK4T?   
CG: ARE YOU SERIOUSLY GOING TO TRY THIS SHIT   
GC: >:?   
CG: YES, EXACTLY, ILLUSTRATE MY POINT WITH PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE EMOTICONS WHY DON’T YOU   
CG: THAT SHIT IS THE SHIT I AM TALKING ABOUT. MY FINGER HOVERS OVER THIS EXCREMENT PILE ALONE, IN QUIVERING INDICTMENT.   
GC: PL34S3 K33P T4LK1NG 4BOUT POOP 1 4M SO 3XC1T3D TO H34R MOR3   
CG: SHUT UP.   
CG: YOU ARE DELIBERATELY DODGING THE POINT.   
CG: UNFORTUNATELY FOR YOU THIS POINT IS ATTACHED TO A CURVED THROWING IMPLEMENT, SPECIFICALLY A BOOMERANG BUT YOU SHOULD FEEL FREE TO IMAGINE A THEMATIC SCYTHE AS WELL.   
CG: IT HITS YOU HARD ON THE BACK OF THE HEAD AND KNOCKS THE SHIFTINESS RIGHT OUT OF YOU.   
CG: THE POPULACE, STUNNED BY YOUR SUDDEN CASE OF THE STRAIGHTFORWARD ANSWERS, DEMANDS AN ENCORE.   
GC: DO YOU 3V3N KNOW WH4T YOUR3 T4LK1NG 4BOUT   
CG: SOMETHING HAPPENED.   
CG: THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT?    
GC: TH4TS FUNNY, B3C4US3 1 THOUGHT YOU W3R3 4LSO 1NT3R3ST3D 1N WH3R3   
GC: SOM3HOW 1 3XP3CT TO S33 WHYS TOO B3FOR3 TH3 N1GHT 1S DON3   
CG: I KNOW YOU DIDN’T KILL HER.    
GC: GR34T   
GC: MYST3RY SOLV3D   
GC: W3 C4N 4LL R3ST 4 L1TTL3 34S13R W1TH D3T3CT1V3 V4NT4S ON TH3 C4S3!   
CG: OK, SORRY.   
CG: I CAN SEE HOW THAT WOULD BE A SORE SUBJECT.   
CG: BUT YOU’VE KILLED PEOPLE BEFORE, RIGHT?    
CG: NEXT TIME YOU’LL PROBABLY MANAGE.   
CG: I MEAN, SHE DIDN’T GET YOU, EITHER, SO CLEARLY YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT. AND SHE’S KILLED WAY MORE PEOPLE THAN YOU HAVE.   
GC: >:[   
GC: DONT R3M1ND M3   
CG: YEAH, I GUESS THAT SORT OF STARTED OUT AS ME TRYING TO CONSOLE YOU AND THEN ENDED UP AS ME RUBBING YOUR TWITCHER IN YOUR OWN PUDDLED INADEQUACY.    
CG: WHOOPS. /:B   
GC: H3H   
GC: MY NOS3 1S MOR3 TH4N UP TO TH3 T4SK TH3S3 D4YS   
GC: 4ND 4CTU4LLY 1TS K1ND OF SW33T HOW OV3RB34R1NG 4ND CONC3RN3D YOU 4R3   
GC: D4R3 1 CONCLUD3 TH4T 4BS3NC3, L1K3 4 GOOD M4R1N4D3, H4S M4D3 TH3 V4LV3 MOR3 T3ND3R?? >:]   
CG: OH FUCK YOU.

You never do pry the whole story out of her. She treats it like a game, which is a real shocker, but you just want to understand. She and Aradia and Vriska and Tavros, they were the kind of catastrophe you’d cry over in a movie, spilling manly pink tears in a populace-decimating torrent all down your sleeve, but in real life they mostly make you nauseous. You can’t talk to Tavros without feeling the hot prickle of embarrassment fill your chute, and Vriska makes weird, ungainly solicitations after the accident, the desperation sitting thick and familiar on every long vowel. Aradia doesn’t talk to you at all, even after you finally figure out why Sollux’s main reaction to her death was to learn how to use a calendar. And Terezi--

The thing is, you know you got it wrong. You keep getting it wrong. In her head she’s no killer; she believes in justice like she believes in gloves. Inflection-free, she might call her hands clean. So the wounded pride, the flinchy unwillingness to speak; that’s something more than the proportions of revenge. Thinking about it, you’d suspect her of pale hopes thwarted, except that would require her to be capable of pity, wouldn’t it? Instead you suspect her of a more perverse desire for epilogues. You think she doesn’t care for endings that she didn’t engineer.

It’s funny. You could ask Vriska how she blinded her. No doubt she’d be happy to share. No doubt she’d have told you already, if it ever crossed her mind. But somehow, when you think about Terezi Pyrope, you want to hear it from the source. You’d like to hear her tell you how the clean cut she had planned failed, or slid awry against bone.

***

The two of you don’t cross paths again IRL until you’re both forcibly evacuated from the flaming aftermath of the R, by game and death and incomprehensible code. Even then it’s a while before you end up on her planet; you have this dim sense that if you don’t wait long enough to accept her many forced-casual invites, or if you wait too long, she’ll rescind the offer as soon as you approach the gate. You avoid formulating this fear in complete sentences, because then you’d have to admit that it’s idiotic-- Terezi might tire of you faster than anyone you know, but the great thing about planets is that two people can exist on one without ever clapping sensory organs on each other. Still it slithers through the back of your head, the dim sense that anything she could give with one hand she’ll take with the other: though what kind of charity you imagine she’s running is a territory outside your idiom.

She’s actually easier to talk to face to face, as it turns out. You use Trollian as much when sharing a room as when sharing a universe, socially anxious bilge-scum that you are; but you get to see her smile at your jokes, a lean white flash of tooth and jaw. The ratio of textual cackle to external mirth isn’t exactly 1-to-1, but she does laugh a lot, in near silence, her fangs ashudder around swallowed sound.

Also, her hive is frankly nicer than her server-vandalism gave you any reason to expect. “Proof of malice,” you say triumphantly-- some of her scales even match the carpets, you checked-- and she quirks an eyebrow at you, fake-blank, crimson slivers of her gone eyes showing over her glasses. “A leader’s residence should stand out,” she says, as if even slovenly paint swathes could make your hive less average. “His hardworking server, however, may be permitted to keep her muted palette on the inside.”

You groan, falling back to lie flat across the carpet, your legs still folded but your arms splayed out. Skaia is close to its zenith in the unripe green sky; its light streams pale through the window, in twelve intersecting parts, and covers your face with its fine dust. “That is a crock of steamed hooey,” you tell her. You think of all your walls, which she disdained to demolish the way you feared she would, but only plastered gleefully with color.

She’s doing something to you, you know. Or for you. It’s the one thing you figured out, sweeps ago, when Terezi was an unnerving friend-of-a-friend rather than the unhyphenated whatever she is now. People like her because she takes an interest. She’s not shy, either, about her investments. She doesn’t cover her curiosity in bluster, or retreat because she’s too afraid to advance. Something to learn there, no fucking doubt. But you’ve never before met a troll who rips off roofs to strengthen the foundations. Trolls don’t mess around with stopgap solutions: the Alternian cure for stupidity is a fresh microwaveable batch of instant death noodles, and the seasoning is maim. And then there’s Terezi, who listens to you talk yourself into a corner over and over again, paying perfect attention, and looks at you like a person who knows how to butcher joint by joint-- to disarm without damaging the core.

***

“I need your help,” she says, almost the minute she wakes from taking apart Derse.

You meant to go back to LOPAH before she returned, make it look like you got bored of sitting tense next to her silent coon; she roused faster than you could hustle. She’s still blinking the sopor out of her lashes. That’s easier, these days, now that you’ve all had to start watering down your slime. But she’s alert, prick-eared, her clothes already drying in the seasonless heat, and you cross your arms in wary skepticism or else weak self-defense.

“We just pulled off regisurp, I think we can--”

“--relax?” she finishes. The fond contempt is such you almost cringe. She shakes her head, impatiently, her whole body crackling with eager, and you are pulled up short by the memory of Sollux rising out of his most severe funk-- which in the end he did with enough inconsiderate rapidity to give you both whiplash, and not just because he kicked you out of his block with telekinetic force. That was a good night, obnoxious as it was to get gratitude in the form of the psychic boot. Sollux was warring with himself, you suppose, more sincerely than Terezi was with monarchical government, no matter how many panicking Dersites she had to crunch through to get to a place where she could safely transfer consciousness. His victory was less complete but also less explicable, although at this stage in your life you do not think of winning as the stuff of fantasy.

Maybe you should be tired of acting the witness. But your resentment gland is low on fuel, burnt out by chemical relief. And it’s legitimately the business of knights to hold vigil, you think, almost proud.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” says Terezi. “It’s going to be challenging, even with you. But now that we’ve gotten the most important operation out of the way, and we can focus on more personal goals...”

“Since when is five days from the Reckoning a good time for personal goals? You were supposed to self-actualize on your own time!”

Terezi snickers, then sobers. “This one is _tough_ ,” she says, strangely earnest, as she always is when she flatters you; like to get out the words she has to believe them herself, for a second, for as long as it takes to sway you. “And I don’t think it’s meant to be solved alone.”

Her eyes track yours.

“Fine,” you say. Your hands drop to your sides without a sound. “Fine. Let’s quest.”

‘Personal goals’ turns out to mean, among other things, scaling a mile-high pile of rock. All the rock and loam on Terezi’s planet is yellow, clayish, same color as eyeballs if it comes to that. After you get off grass, the dirt coats your sneakers and ankles, creeping up your dark pants. Terezi walks at your side but a little behind; the path’s not quite wide enough to go abreast. Or she’s just set on looking over your shoulder. You find yourself listening to her footsteps, ungentle over dust. It’s not soothing, but it reminds you of your heart. A two-pronged rhythm, too pathetically quick for its confines.

She’s talking. Telling you about this temple you’re headed towards, in a voice slightly too confident, too level, and with effort you stay quiet until she stops, mid-sentence and mid-climb.

“I just wanted to get out of the tree,” she admits.

Glaring, you gesture for her to elaborate. Terezi gives an articulate shrug.

“All that time trapped in a sweet mulberry tower... I got antsy. But the only temple on this mountain was long ago turned into a scale-buffing salon!”

Somehow, you really aren’t surprised.

“Should’ve fucking known,” you say, with less rancor than you could have anticipated. These nights it seems like you’re growing ahead of yourself, your opportunities expanding faster than your hopes, and the change leaves you hardly able to trace the lineage of your own happiness. “You always lie.”

Behind you, Terezi sniffs like you’ve insulted her. Which you have, actually, though only in the privacy of your thinkpan. You might not be qualified to source contentment, but you can at least muster a guess.

“I do not,” she says, “always lie. You just aren’t smart enough to pick out deceit.”

One way or another you don’t turn around.

The summit is a golden bluff, scraggled by scrub like an ineptly-shaven jaw. The salon is apparently not in business right now: its pillars loom up pale from gilt foundations, like dragon’s teeth that didn’t make it all the way to being soldiers, and you don’t see any cutesy bullshit lizardfolk peeking out through the gaps. You almost mount the ancient steps, but Terezi shakes her head no.

“Close your eyes,” she says.

“Wow, fuck you,” you say, and look at the cliff instead, precipitous and dry. Beyond its edge her land curls to fit the sky’s near curve, long horizon turned crooked by the silhouette of ruins atop hills. Terezi seems less nervous than she did when ushering you out of her block, but the calm that overtook her is probably more worrisome, by any objective measure.

You don’t think about the fact that you can discern her emotional state without looking at her. Maybe it’s written, in secret glyphs and gross carmine rivers, across the face of the planet at your feet: maybe she only thought she was lying about this place being a place of enlightenment. Maybe you’re as tired as she is awake.

“You’re no fun,” she says, and then, “close your eyes, Karkat.” She says all this without touching you.

You do as she instructs. Whether in reference to one person or one species, her advice has never really led you wrong.

She lets out a little sigh. She lays hands over your shut lids, and steers you forward, towards the edge. “Terezi, what the hell--” you start, thinking of Tavros, thinking that she’s going to stab you in the back after all, make a cleaner sweep of you than she did of all her practice projects; but your feet never hit air, and after another moment she stops, her elbows bracketing your shoulders, fingers hot across the bridge of your brow. She’s laughing, you recognize. Her nose she’s buried in your nape, snuffling at the hard hollow where the spine parts for the skull. You try to writhe out of her grip but there’s nowhere to go between her and the drop. She might as well be the beginning and the end of solid ground. She laughs harder when you fight, and she sounds charmed in a way that makes you gratified despite yourself, even now, especially now, with her palms a slippery press against your flexible lashes.

It doesn’t last. The cackle slows to something more like breath. She is still, you think, sniffing, and more than anything else that will happen to you before the game is done, this is the proof that Terezi’s closeness is alteration: because with the hand Jack Noir gashed only bandaged at your side, with your pulse like a hummingbird in your ear, still the only thing you are afraid of is that she will break away; still it doesn’t occur to you what filth there is to be unearthed.

***

There is so much filth.

You think that, a million sweeps later, walking towards the surface of the meteor, because it’s easier than thinking, _there is so much blood_. Kanaya, Feferi, Tavros. Equius and Nepeta splashed side by side. Gamzee. Sollux’s, spattered around the place where his head made a crater in the wall. Easier to think of it, a little manically, as mess. This place was so clean, when you got here. In ten hours you’ve certainly managed to trash the premises. All those secrets, laid bare by a little stress and a lot of terror, those deep-down faults. Yours didn’t even rank; or else it was the worst of all.

As promised, she’s waiting for you. There’s someone-- Gamzee? God. No, that’s Vriska sprawled at her feet, her whole body motionless, like a landscape in the shadow of some high cliff. Terezi steps around her, and her bootheels track blood. You cannot honestly believe that she is wearing her FLARP costume. You cannot believe it still fits.

“Karkat,” she says, and then, “Um. I guess this looks pretty bad.” She lowers her sword. Her eyes are downcast but you can see them reflected runnily down the sweep of the blade. A little crazed, you recall your backup plan of shaking down Vriska for an explanation of how Terezi went blind, the one part of that story-- between conception and resurgent aftermath-- that you were never handed, the flaw whose presence had to be inferred. Now, you suppose, it’s gone. Even Terezi may no longer know.

You open your arms, because that’s what you’re good for-- doomed treaties, alliances that end in exile. Friendships that get everybody killed. Your uses are well fucking documented, by Terezi mostly. Terezi who, since she’s already been banished, bereaved, and twice outmaneuvered by an evil clown, steps into your embrace.

She holds you harder than you can hold her: her chin almost tops your head, and her mouth she presses delicately to the corner of your hairline, where skin hardens to horn.

Here it is. If you could you would do for her what she did for you, and dig her misery out from its buried riverbed. But your nose is clogged from weeping, and her eyes, you think, are open. The most you can manage is to touch her, without concurrent shame.


	4. kanaya maryam

**4\. kanaya maryam**

 

Some mornings, Vriska messages you in the spirit of discovery, with every time a new exclamation: Well look who’s online when all young trolls should be safely encooned, she says. Look who. Or, Kanaya! Finally! Or, Oh, did you want to talk? I guess I could clear a minute in my busy schedule. You know. Because I am a great-- sorry, _gr8_ \-- friend. Pre-eminent among the things Vriska has taught you over the sweeps is that you have a particular aversion to abbreviations, and since her advent you have more than once thought your heart should make selections with more attention to typographic style. But some mornings Vriska doesn’t message you at all, her username a humming absence poured into neat print, and then you know that you made the right choice; perhaps the only choice, with the force of shapeless desire like a knot below your ribs, and holding closed your gut.

Just once-- when Vriska takes under an hour to get to the _It’s not everyone’s moirail can accommodate a serious FLARPer’s schedule!_ stage, and lingers there, crowing-- you point out that her flirtations with the diurnal are not an inconvenience. You sleep at night. It’s easy, in fact, to talk to her in the lowering afternoon, when exhaustion makes her complimentary, proprietary, and all her other friends have shuffled off to slime. Not once has she disturbed you from your rest.

When your reassurances trail off she is silent. Vriska, you type, then think better of it. She’s so obvious; it should relieve you, but it feels like a burden. At last she says, You know what I mean-- and unfortunately you do.

After that you let her call you ‘her insomnia-enabler’ without protest. She accuses you of everything, negligence and loyalty alike, and you remind yourself of the resentment you feel when she’s not calling you anything. You hold it as a promise to yourself. The frustration she incites in you is proof that you were made to make her palatable. Wasn’t your insomnia evidence that you were destined for strange slumber? Although Vriska’s resemblance to Skaia is tenuous at best, but you have found her, too, sleeping in her tower with dead urgency, her body heavy or struggling through dreams. She looks nice in gold. You would love to see her open her eyes, which would shine like a cat’s in combination with her principessal yellow gown.

Vriska introduces you to Eridan and Aradia and Tavros, of whom Eridan and Aradia you already knew; but hard to explain that ever since your awakening on a magical moon you have been cultivating the acquaintance of the people you see in its clouds, so you call it a coincidence and make much of Tavros, which seems to please her anyway. For the first sweeps of your wigglerhood you knew solitary pleasures, and the plop of undead heads landing in the ha-ha was the closest you came to enjoying the company of other trolls: but since then you have discovered a predilection, even a talent, for helping others, and you are glad to give your time to their exploration.

She does not introduce you to Terezi. Terezi introduces herself.

GC: H3Y FUSSYF4NGS  
GC: 1F 4 ZOMB13 D13S 4LON3 1N TH3 D3S3RT  
GC: DO3S 1T M4K3 4 SOUND???

Your first thought is: so that’s where Vriska got Fussyfangs from. Your second thoughts retreat into the back of your mind, diminutive, more shadowed than felt.

GA: Yes Theres A Protracted Burbling If You Do It Right

As it happens, you get along beautifully.

***

AT: i FIND fLARPING TO BE, pRETTY PERSONALLY SATISFYING,  
AT: oN MULTIPLE LEVELS, rEALLY  
AT: lIKE AN AMAZING CONGLOMERATION, oF THINGS THAT ARE GOOD  
GA: You Never Struck Me As A Disciple Of Violence  
GA: Which Is Why I Ask I Suppose  
AT: oH BUT IT’S NOT  
AT: i MEAN, yES, iT IS,  
AT: iT IS REALLY VIOLENT, wOW, i SINCERELY REGRET EVEN STARTING TO SUGGEST THAT IT IS NOT, bECAUSE THAT IS SO UNTRUE,  
AT: yESTERDAY I HAD TO HELP ARADIA DECAPITATE A HORSARONI WITH A SHARPENED WHIP,  
GA: Uh  
AT: bUT AFTERWARDS, wE USED ITS HEAD TO PASS THROUGH A SECRET GATE AND INTO A MAGICAL GARDEN,  
AT: yOU WOULD HAVE LIKED IT,  
AT: wHICH IS MY POINT,  
AT: aLL THE UNPLEASANT, uH, bLOOD aND HACKING,  
AT: iS LIKE,  
AT: rEAL KINDLING, fOR A FAKE FIRE,  
AT: aND THE FIRE IS IMAGINATION,  
GA: This Is Starting To Seem Even More Terrible Than Hitherto All Of A Sudden  
AT: sORRY,  
AT: i GUESS i THINK, tHE STORIES ARE WORTH IT,  
AT: eVEN IF, yOU HAVE TO THROW UP A LOT AFTERWARD, bECAUSE IT WAS A MOMMA HORSE,

You pretend to understand less than you do. In fact you doubt you would have liked whatever excuse for a garden a gamegrub could contrive, and the butchery of mammals is not your province; but the interchange of death for poetry, of cut for bloom, presents a logic inescapable to a literary connoisseur like yourself. Also, you have seen the future, and it features all manner of slay.

Vriska treats your attempts at deconstruction with derision, but she’s as eager as you to narratize. She sends you drawings of herself as a figure out of history or myth, and you send back notes about the costume: _in the era of gamblignants, chain mail would have been dangerously retro_. You give her the same advice you gave Eridan, which is, _Raise the heels and add lace_. You strain for accuracy. And when you see her cultivating Tavros and Aradia for the romance of it-- undisputed victor sweeping hopeless invertebrates away to a life of adventurecrime-- you do your best to help sustain the arc.

Terezi knows. Knows all about it, in her own sly way, and thanks you at unexpected moments for what she terms your expertise. Sometimes you suspect her of having woken, like you did, on Prospit, her quick eyes opened to Skaia’s immense light. It would explain the uneasy sense of level ground that overtakes you when you talk to her. When you visit her tower, she’s always deep under, but it occurs to you that whenever you sleep on Alternia she is, almost certainly, awake, and no matter what alertness her dreamself might sometimes muster, it would by necessity remain inert under your observation. She’s a few timezones ahead.

It could even be that all of you are awake, all six, or all twelve, and the only reason you don’t know about it is that you alone of them rest while they rise. Maybe they are keeping it from you for the same reason that you never speak to them of gilded boulevards if you can possibly help it. But no, you think, in some relief: Vriska would never be able to stride Prospit’s streets and not brag.

And indeed there is a more probable reason for the unsettling equality that marks your conversations, which is that Terezi is the only person you’ve ever met who’s as sensible as you. Obnoxious verbal tics and a miserable sense of humor, yes, but she comprehends that sometimes people need to be helped.

She may be trying to help Vriska. You can see her, on occasion, in Vriska’s jokes, or Vriska’s awkward kindness, like a thumbprint in unyielding clay.

In the clouds she appears rarely-to-never. Sometimes, there’s a forest; sometimes a tree. In either case she’s alone, and you lose interest. Scratch may have cured you of your early indifference to the prospect of other people, but as studious as you are in your cumulus-perusal, you never wanted to spend your dreams on other people’s isolation. You are almost surprised every time you remember that in real life, Terezi is as outgoing a troll as her sister. A venturesome gamer, prone to pulling up stakes and leaving her hive for week-long campaigns in distant blue hills. It strikes you as unlikely.

She’s great, says Vriska. Not as great as me, says Vriska, but pretty cool. You take this to mean _better_ and _dangerous_ respectively. You are almost, halfway, right.

***

AG: Kanaya?  
AG: Kanaya, are you there?  
AG: Shit.  
AG: Come oooooooon.  
AG: ........  
AG: You know, this is a LOT of 8lood.  
AG: We are talking tidal spray here!  
AG: Or we would 8e if either of us lived 8y the fucking ocean.

You aren’t there.

You’re asleep when Vriska forces Tavros off a cliff, and you’re asleep when Aradia dies. They do it all in the safety of the evening, and in your globetop tower you record the caprices of the future without regard for the present’s dying agonies. On Prospit, every day is a clear, warm day, the buildings etched in honey against black, and you could count each golden brick were you less busy counting clouds.

Vriska appears in the last.

The cloud was scudding gently. It darkens from the center on out, like the seep of an inky blue. There’s her face, formed as if from capillaries in paper, ragged across the surface of condensation, and there’s her hair massed octopussish under her slim skull. Her hair slumped across one half her forehead, and sinking, tail-first, into the mutant eye. The remains of which, you note, have slicked her wayward locks to a yellow coherence, like greased rope.

You lean out the window with your hands braced on the sill and watch her stir-- the movement multiplied over the clear facets of voluminous cloud-- you watch her wake. Her eye, opening. _When is this?_ You have not yet discovered that the skies of Skaia are as able to depict your contemporaries as your hereafters. It tells the truth, and for you truth, meaning, the things that you were born for, are still a long way off, not locked from you by distance more than time. Vriska stands and her hair pours from her face, or is that blood, a black torrent so glistening and slow it seems to arc outward from her bent head of its own sticky volition. Lightning, from her window; for a bare second it delineates the course of blue from intermingled strands. I have to warn you, you think, transfixed, repulsed, about to pitch forward over the sill in your attempt to penetrate the sky. For the first time Skaia seems less like a mirror than a veil. Or maybe you’re just thinking, still, of the fall of her hair, so long and so unbrushed, but smoothed and anchored now by soaking weight.

She lifts her head to look at you with one wide yellow eye. The cloud whites out.

Later, when you are a little older, a little taller, a little more knowledgeable about the art of divination and a little worse at memory, you will think that you never loved her pale; you never wanted anything from her but the deep flush of pity, fingertips to wrist, mouth to tentative mouth, rumble sphere bumping undeveloped rumble sphere in licentious rumble array. For now you know better. You want desperately to get to her. You’d pick her up off the floor she has so badly stained and carry her with her head on your shoulder to your warm, quiet hive, where thunder is unheard of except in the first breaking swell of summer and even then each flash of light is muted by long cloth.

***

When you surface your lusus is hovering anxiously.

She clicks at you in the language of moths as you extract yourself from your coon and all its emerald attractions. Okay, no. She clicks at you, and you suppose language where there is none. Still, when you listen to her mouthparts scraping you think of tiny white things throwing themselves at lightbulbs or at flames. In the best-case scenario, far-off suns. You have sopor in your ears and you are endeavoring to free them of it when you see Vriska’s messages flashing on your husktop screen.

You pad across the room to read.

After a while, you finish. Your lusus does not appear reassured. Hard to imagine what she’s seeing on your face.

Your head aches. You remember, when you were very young, your head aching in the same way, because you had been awake so long, your eyes overbrimming with light until it sank in and bruised your brain. So many barriers, between you and the light, but you could never shrink back far enough, even sopor would not scare it off. Sopor is translucent: it catches brightness in the green depths of its shiver. You should have remembered that.

And then Scratch came, and spoke to you on a field of sand, and somehow after that you could find darkness anywhere.

You’re not sure why you’re thinking of Scratch.

GA: Hello Are You Still There

Several minutes pass like perigees. The headache drips down your slotted spine, spans your damp back. You think, Aradia is dead, several times, and each time the thought dissolves like a chance pattern on sand, the tracks left by desert snakes over dunes; but though you look for anger it evades you, sinking swift as water into dust. You were very smug, with your foreknowledge, your prophecies like rain. The clouds bellying and close to collapse. But it’s as if you’ve turned around and discovered that whole acres of your garden have gone thirsting while you locked in your complacency, and now, at last, the roots have crumbled, the leaves flowered to dust, your strict arrangements of branch and crown laid flat-- some giant book might have snapped shut and pressed them to two dimensions, their growth less necessary than their deaths preserved.

You stop trying to think about Aradia. It’s easier, in any case, to turn your mind to Tavros, to Sollux. To Vriska. A gardener has no time for dead things, or at least those dead things that leave no bodies to be buried: a gardener must tend to the living. Even if none of the living are presently online or responsive, and are probably busy bleeding like a tide neither of you have ever seen. Should you be worried for Vriska’s life? But Terezi did this. You don’t think that if Terezi were going to kill someone they’d be able to use Trollian after. You would never suspect her of imprecision, or uncertainty.

Outside the window dawn breaks clean as a grapefruit. The peel of transparent skin off sectioned land and sky; a fleshy parting, sun-glossed. You must be hungry. In general, dry-raised, you prefer juice to fruit.

AG: Hey.  
GA: Where Have You Been  
AG: Wow.  
AG: Is that all I get?  
GA: And Thats Supposed To Mean What Exactly  
AG: I don’t know.  
AG: What’s it take to win a measly, ‘8oy, Vriska, I’m sure glad you’re not dead!’ around here?  
AG: Or something.  
AG: Do you want me to up the wound count a little????????  
AG: I 8et I could still shed a leg 8efore calling it a night.  
GA: Sorry  
GA: I Hereby Amend That Rude Geographical Inquiry To An Expression Of Devout Satisfaction At Finding You Alive  
AG: What?  
AG: Ugh, never mind.  
AG: Look, can you do me a favor?  
GA: Me  
AG: Am I talking to some other meddler?  
AG: I need you to talk to Terezi for me.   
GA: Im Not Planning To Be The Instrument Of Your Vengeance If Thats What Youre Asking  
GA: Im Not Even Sure What Such An Implements Career Would Entail  
GA: Probably Nothing Good  
AG: No, not th8t!  
AG: I’m done with the revenge thing, okay, I have seen the error of my ways. Pay8ack is soooooooo passé.  
AG: Everything’s 8een sorted out.  
GA: Then What Need Could You Possibly Have For My Interference  
GA: ?  
GA: Since You Have Handled Quote Unquote Everything With Such Admiring Swiftness And Decisiveness  
AG: I don’t know, may8e you could have advised me or something?  
AG: Pretty gratuitous, 8ut it would have 8een fun to talk to you a8out this stuff.  
GA: Hmm  
AG: Like, may8e if you’d 8een there when I was 8eing H8UNTED OUT OF MY FUCKING M8ND W8TH GHOSTS  
AG: Some things would have gone differently!  
AG: I mean that’s your ‘thing’, isn’t it? Comforting me at weird moments? Holding my hand when I’m acting like a 8a8y?  
AG: You could have said something really 8oring, like, This Too Shall Pass, instead of just snoozing in your coon like a wiggler who’s too 8usy C8TCHING ZS to   
AG: Goddamnit.  
AG: That’s not the point.  
AG: I need you to do me a favor now. Okay? Just, like, to provide the garnish atop everything’s outsortedness.  
AG: The icing on the truce cake! Okay?  
GA: Vriska  
AG: So will you do it?  
GA: What Do You Want Me To Tell Her

This time, the silence lasts longer. But there is no doubt of her attention, on the other end of the line.

AG: Tell her I don’t 8lame her.  
AG: Really, I don’t.  
AG: 8ecause I g8t it.  
AG: Someone hurts you, or your friend, or just generally ru8s your nose in the dirt a8out hoooooooow much sm8rter they might or might not 8e,  
AG: And so you get ticked off.  
AG: And you do something that could maaaaaaaaay8e 8e interpreted as a little unreasona8le, or nasty.  
AG: 8ut I’m a 8ig person!  
AG: So, you know, I   
AG: I can totally forgive her for that.

***

Night-- early evening-- finds you tossing and sleepless as an infant. The sopor levels slosh: the carpet will have blotted up the overflow by morning, but it will crackle where you step too close to the coon’s broad base, having dried to a stiffness like glue in hair. You are not thinking about your carpets.

Scratch spoke to you in terms a child could not have understood, his head round as a hole. He advised you to gather your determined friends like a revolutionary courting apostles, with the promise of kindness and good metaphors. Why? you asked, and he pointed you to a vision of meteors, hurtling cherry-red through upper atmosphere. Do you know, he said, I don’t get to see them, your clouds, and you said, So how do you know what I’m supposed to look for? and he said, as if it were an answer, In fact I don’t get to see anything. Then laughed as only a man with a ball for a head can.

“Princess,” someone is saying to you, and you open your eyes.

Prospit. Of course, Prospit. You can tell by the shine. It occurs to you that, with your days spent on Alternia and your other days spent here, it’s been a long time since you’ve experienced real night.

Above you a Prospitian looks as worried as is possible with his chessman’s distilled face, his eyes an awkward punctuation for that blank oval page. “Princess,” he says, teeth discontinuously aflash in its deep slot of open mouth, “there’s a girl in the street.”

This mystifies you. “Yes?” you say, as polite as you can manage through the transitional languor. “And?”

“Not--” his embarrassment is showing; he seems to realize for the first time that he’s in one of the rooms of his peculiar adopted royalty, a ground proscribed to him by traditions you don’t particularly comprehend, “--not one of us. Another of the princesses. She went walking, and she fell.”

Vriska, you think, all dreaming vagueness drained.

“What does she--?” you start; then, shaking your head, you go out to see.

As promised, there is someone flat on their back in the avenue. People give her a wide berth, or pick a different route entirely, so you can see the smear of bluish liquid on the cobblestones, unobscured by any white bodies. Good lord, you think, and are aware almost simultaneously of a rising rush. The adrenaline tastes sour in the clean curve of your mouth, but here it is, after all. You will be able to enact your protective fantasies. You will get to touch her at the seams of herself.

Except--

You come closer.

“Oh,” you say, looking down at Terezi’s tear-streaked face.

She’s smaller than she was in the future, which is one of those sentences that you think better of before you think it. However. One hand, uncurled, rests level with her head.

You stare at her a little longer. Then you bend down and scoop her up, sliding one arm under her shoulders and one around her waist, and to your utter startlement her eyes begin to flutter before you have her upper body off the ground. So, you think, for one absurd second, you’re an early riser, too-- and then she says, “Oh, god,” and opens them, and your mind is wiped blank.

Her head droops in towards the curve of your shoulder. Her eyes are red: cherry-red, like irons from the fire, like the meteorological promise of certain doom.

“Who is this,” she demands, voice high and shrill.

For a moment you don’t answer. You are transfixed by the sight of her injury (and vice versa). In punishment for your tardiness she starts to struggle, twisting like a cat in your arms; she elbows you in the throat, a glancing blow, and half tumbles out from your loosened grip.

“It’s GA,” you manage, in no part thanks to her attempt on your chitinous windpipe. “ _Kanaya_.”

She goes abruptly still. You take the opportunity to regather her.

“Kanaya,” she mutters, and then, while you try to drag her arm around the back of your neck-- let it do some good, while it’s in the area-- “Did Vriska send you to get me?”

You consider. Her tone is not hopeful. You think about Vriska, and Vriska’s message, and the vestiges of Terezi’s eyes, which to your horror you realize are slopping out down her cheeks as you lift her to the vertical. _Everything’s sorted out._

“You’re dreaming,” you say. The edge of hysteria gives a surreal quality to your voice which may convince her more than the words. “Close your eyes.”

“What eyes,” she says, but she obeys. To your relief the scarlet goo shows no signs of escaping through the furious clench of her long lashes. Globs of it still cling to her cheeks, mingling pellucid with the blood-tails that stripe the soft grey skin, and with a thoughtless thumb you smudge both vitreous humor and tears, marking a long horizontal stripe across the breadth of her high cheekbone. “Sorry,” you say, and she almost opens her eyes again. You watch the fine control: small muscles in her temple, beneath her eyelids, acting to keep sealed each new hole.

“We should get you off the road.”

“Now you tell me there’s a road,” says Terezi, which almost makes you smile. “A dream-road?” you offer, because for a blind girl, Prospit might as well be a fantasy-- no battle-plans, no ornate architecture, no deferential aliens, only the unexpected cold of pavement beneath your shoulderblades.

She makes it to her feet on the third try, and leans on you the whole way back to your block. You would ask her to direct you to hers, but how would she? And how would you, without explaining further? Maybe when her eyes have cooled to some semblance of solidity, you will tell her where she is, and what she missed. Until then, how much easier, to have her and your own possessions in one room. Yes.

You seat her at your desk chair and she tips her head back in blank surrender. “Fussyfangs,” she says, “for how long have you had the advantage of me?”

“We know each other’s names,” you feel obliged to point out. Terezi pops an eye open as if to give you a sarcastic look, but since it’s the wrong one, you don’t much feel the impact. You tamp it closed with a delicate finger and begin in earnest to scrub her stained face. “Mmmhmmmph,” she says, into the washcloth, and, after you have lifted it, “Okay, fine. How long have you known that Vriska was killing people?”

This is such an extraordinary statement that you have no recourse but to drop the washcloth again after refreshing its saturation. Terezi yelps a little at the hot, sudden contact, shock jerking through her like a manual twitch through a puppet’s thin strings; then settles.

“How long have you _not_?” you say, eventually, putting pressure on the lacery of dried blood at her jaw.

“Oh, fuck you,” she says, in uncharacteristic pique. She deflates in a lean moment. “You know what I mean,” she says, and you don’t, quite: perhaps extremely. Whatever you foresaw coming from Terezi Pyrope, it was not this.

“Elaborate,” you tell her. She shifts and you pluck the cloth away. Her face is almost clean, save for a little crusting around the eyes, and echoes of blue. You can see red beading between her lashes, little flicks of red.

“Killing people unjustly,” she says. More aggrieved: “Lying about it.”

“You mean you believed her?”

Ruefully, a smile. At age five, Terezi shows little of that wigglerish plasticity that marks your peers’ unformed faces. Something to do with the remnant blood: it traces lines which don’t yet in good faith exist, but only wander, dormant, under her thinstretched skin.

“I suppose,” she says, “I thought she was doing better.”

“Why?” you ask in frankness. You are kneeling at her side and without thinking you take one of her hands in yours. You are, you suspect, angry. Handling Terezi gently does Vriska no harm, but you derive dark satisfaction from watching the scroll of her mouth, which tightens when she says her sister’s name, a concentration. All the weakness Vriska ever denied you, you can extract from her maker, and feel in it a kind of thrifty joy.

“I thought I was almost finished with her,” says Terezi.

You snort. You can’t help it. It slips quick as an animal out of you. Terezi’s expression, when it turns on you, is quizzical, but not bewildered. She has hiked an eyebrow without disturbing the equilibrium of her shut eye, a trick you’ve never managed, in years of trying, a mirror balanced on your knees and a stack of tawdry novels at your side.

“Don’t you think I could have done it?” she asks. “I trust your opinion in these matters.”

“What, people?” you say. Also, “If anyone could, I imagine it would be you.”

This is not quite true. Terezi sighs anyway.

She tries to sit up, and you catch her before she doubles over, heaving her up off the seat. “Imagine that,” she echoes, muffled, her face buried in your neck. You think you feel her leaking eyes: the prick of them as teeth against your throat’s steep base. For a moment you hold her like that, upright, your arms under hers and your jaw tangent her skull. One horn brushes almost to the back of your lifted ear. You look outward. You are a little bemused by her warm weight. How often have you thought of people as creations, without testing their heft? You have dressed plastic and yourself without considering the limitations of fabric; its ability to contain alien bones. Shivering now from exhaustion and pain, she seems content to stay caught in your hands, but who knows when that will change, or why. Over her shoulder you can see a cloud, the mass of it partitioned by the window, its image not yet concrete, flickering, inchoate-- her shadow, once removed. Her shadow greencast on a far wall.

“What are you looking at?” she asks, trying to straighten.

“Nothing,” you reply. You lower her, slack-legged, to the much softer ground.


	5. terezi pyrope

**5\. terezi pyrope**

 

She runs away.

Vriska Serket, age four: puzzle and occasional delight, but not your first choice of hiveguests. “What are you doing here?” you say, utterly baffled, when she appears at the base of your tree; and her grin is a beacon even viewed from above.

“Invite me up and I’ll tell you!” she shouts. The pre-dawn light falls bluish on the distant ground. In it, she looks color-coded, from head to foot the child of her caste. But her teeth show white through gloom.

“If you’ve come to murder me, I will haunt your conniving butt,” you say. You are loosing the ladder even as you speak.

“Don’t be stupid,” she says, and shimmies up, her face a rising ovoid that pales as it nears. “I didn’t come to kill you. I came to live with you.”

“Nice of you to ask first,” you say, although Vriska’s nonexistent relationship with permission isn’t actually your number one concern. You look her over critically while she sets down her bag of junk, kicking aside a stack of law books to clear room for what are probably a bunch of cheap-ass spheroids. Or maybe she just brought her FLARPing gear? It’s the kind of thing she would do: uproot herself with only lies for baggage.

She’s tired. Her hands shake a little when she drops her duffel. Along her hairline, you can see traces of perspiration. She must have walked half the night to get here, because you don’t think that castle-dwelling, aristocratic Vriska Serket has ever in her life touched a hovercar. You amuse yourself for a moment by imagining her trying to call up a taxidrone-- bullying them over the phone to accept RP money in exchange for their speedsome services-- but she’s looking at you, expectant, and you find it hard to resist answering her glance. “You can sit wherever,” you say; predictably, she takes over your just-abandoned desk chair.

“So?”

Her face turns calculating-- or would, if the tectonic shifts were visible through layers of juvenile fat. “You tell me, Redglare.” She has unconsciously taken a sort of invertebrate fighting stance, sitting backwards on the inflexible chair, her arms crossed atop its back and her chin digging deep into her hands. Both toes barely trail the rug-raised floor. “What do you want in exchange for preventative custody?”

Funny. You’d expected her to feign shock, and claim sisterly obligation. But you guess you haven’t known each other long enough yet. Soon, you think: soon you’ll have her taking your partnership for granted, after which point things will turn a lot easier. She won’t be so prepared for negotiation. But tonight, you’re going to have to dash her hopes, and so it’s just as well that she came expecting resistance.

“Don’t be stupid,” you say, playing along. “No one wants you dead.”

She looks at you over the tops of her glasses. “Well,” you amend, “no one’s actually hunting you.”

“That’s all you know,” she says, spinning. Her hair lifts and falls like a veil. “When my lusus figures out that I’ve gone--”

“She’ll starve to death in her pit, alone, and then be eaten by her fewer-legged brethren!”

Vriska goes white. You watch, carefully, as her booted foot braces against one wheel of the chair. “No,” she breathes. “No, you wish.” She leans forward and the chair’s spine creaks, bending to her weight. Framed by the slump of her dark hair her face is narrower, more adult, and unexpectedly serious, beneath the coat of garish lipstick and the too-big lenses. “My mother knows what I smell like, Terezi. She will track me.”

“Do spiders even have noses?” you wonder, then forestall her answer with a hand. “Who cares! You are not really encouraging me to let you stay,” you say, turning your palm sideways, to point at her blade-first. “You say something like that, what am I supposed to think? Do you want to take me down with you?”

Something almost sly flashes across her face. “She won’t be able to get up the tree.”

You stare at her.

“That,” you say, “is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Vriska, she’s a spider.”

“A really big spider!” (Like thunder, you hear the other seven exclamation points buried in the r.)

“I can’t believe this is an actual argument we are having,” you tell her, folding your arms. She looks, desperately, not at you but at the branches outside, their pinkness a whisper through fading night.

“Huge,” she says. She stands: her long legs upending the chair in the process. Having freed herself with a minimum of dignity she crosses the room to stand almost in front of you, but veers, at the last moment, heading for the window and the dark. She hasn’t even taken off her jacket, and it occurs to you that you wouldn’t mind, really, having her over for the night, pretending to humor her for the pleasure of examining her habits and introducing her to your stuffed attorneys. Too late now.

“We could keep running, then,” she says. “If you really think she’d make it up. We’ve got a headstart, she won’t try to leave the hive until she’s really hungry, we could be halfway to the sea by then--”

“From squatter to co-fugitive,” you say, “attractive!”

You think she might smile. But her wobby expression resolves itself into pique, her mouth small and her nose pinched. “Whatever,” she mutters, “thought you were an adventurer, so sue me, next time I’ll guess again.” She can’t ever, really, stop herself. “It wouldn’t be that long. She’d leave off within, oh, a week or so, assuming she didn’t catch anyone on the way.”

This is an unpleasant thought. It had not occurred to you that there might be innocents strewn in Vriska’s wake. More than usual, anyway. You cease to regret nixing the sleepover.

“Assumptions are dangerous.”

“Who jammed the branch up your ass?” she demands. “God, I thought you’d--”

She breaks off.

You wait. In the glass, her reflection is wan, a smudge so bloodless as to suggest undeath. You see her teeth appear, worrying the bundle of her lip, one serrated fang cutting into the gloss to expose the black beneath. Black as her pump biscuit, you think; smiling a little. “You really won’t,” she says in wonder, her eyes darting to you and darting from. “I thought. Don’t you ever want to leave, Terezi? Just take your stuff and go?”

That makes you look at her bag again.

She picks it up, hastily, scrabbling with protective hands at the strap. “You don’t even have a lusus,” she adds, and her fingers close into fists.

Yes I do, you think, but Vriska already knows so much about you, and no one needs to know everything. What’s the point of having a mind, if not to hold other people’s scavenged parts in your head? But too much and you might find yourself crowded, sitting in the dark having arguments with the dead. Anyway, you like to think of other people’s pictures of you, discontinuous and malformed-- as good or better than an army of secret clones, because they can do your dirty work with just a whisper from the back of the brain.

“Maybe that’s why,” you say, aloud. “There’s nothing keeping me here. So why move?”

“Right,” says Vriska, sounding despondent. She believes you. She puts her free hand to the glass and the nails make disparate clicks on their light impact. The arm that has the bag-- the left arm, as it happens-- trembles for strain.

“It was a dumb idea,” she says suddenly. “I was just fucking with you.”

“Oh, right,” you say, in a perfect echo, and this time she does smile.

“My lusus is awesome,” she continues. She pauses to let you jump in with agreement. You make a noncommittal noise, but that’s apparently enough. “Yeah, maybe I wanted a break, but who can blame me? Harvesting the cream of the flesh for a ravenous arachnid is boring as hell. It’s beneath me, frankly. I should have--” she gestures “--minions, or something. Spider feeders, so that I can get on with the important business of racking up aaaaaaaaall the levels.”

The set of her jaw, like balance made stone.

“I’ve helped with that, haven’t I?” you say, a little less lightly than you’d like to have said it. You’d thought she’d been more enthusiastic lately; she’s been finding targets herself, sending you dossiers full of evidence against, sometimes with confessions already extracted by probably-licit means. At least in the case of the lowbloods, for whom almost all means are licit. You’re not sure you were wrong-- but maybe the enthusiasm sprang from a different place than you had understood it to.

Vriska shrugs.

“I guess. It’s just so much _work_ , finding these vict-- criminals. Putting them on trial mid-campaign. Luring them home. So yeah, I thought I’d get away from it all for a night or two,” and how far, already, you have come from she’d leave off after the first week.

But not far enough. “Vriska,” you say, and something in your voice makes her pivot: her heels scrubbing carpet, her eyes unshy with hope. You shake your head. “Vriska. If you ditched your lusus, how would we get rid of the bodies?”

It is her turn to gape at you. Well, and of course it is. Vriska Serket never considers how her happiness could relate to her pain: Vriska Serket might be able, just, to sense a correlation in other people, and in how she’d like them to hurt, but it would not occur to her that all her games and violence could be facilitated, in any way, by her great burden. Poor Vriska, whose mother is so present, so insistent, and so hungry for the proceeds of her love, so that Vriska has to scrape and scrounge for other children’s edible lives. She might even regret it, some of the time. If you had a mother like that, would you be willing to pay her price? Probably not. You have to admit, you don’t greatly feel the lack of a custodial claw. But you wouldn’t run, either. You would watch to make sure that she died.

It’s important, you think, to take responsibility for what you have been given.

“We’d find a way,” she says uncertainly. “We could use acid baths or something. Like Troll Jack the Dripper. Anyway, who cares about the corpses? What, you think their quadrantmates are gonna massacre us in vengeance? Please.”

“I don’t know,” you say. “Who does care?”

She frowns, and tries to smooth it, and frowns again. Her pupils don’t track yours; nor is she wearing her focusing lens, but her eyes seem to look through you despite that, or perhaps because of it. Oh, Vriska, you think fondly, I’m really glad to have been given you.

“What’s in the bag,” you ask her, because she’s floundering so much you’re afraid she will turn stubborn, and all things being equal you would rather not have to push her out.

She looks at it in surprise, as if she were not clutching it white-knuckled. “This crap?” she says, then grins, slow and lopsided, the slant of her lips ugly. “I was gonna give it to you, actually, if you took me on. Guess that’s not happening.” An exaggerated shrug, rolling from shoulder to shoulder; you see it in her shadow too, long and crooked on the wall.

“Bribing a legislacerator?” you say, and then, “Do I get to know what riches I missed out on?”

That blue-black mouth moves in a complicated way over its nest of teeth. “Actually,” she says, “changed my mind. You can have them. You’re welcome to everything I own!”

The bag hits carpet with a solid thud, belying any orbs it does contain. She sends it skidding towards you with a well-aimed kick-- friction is no match for Vriska thwarted-- and you kneel, smoothly, to stop it before it knocks your knees out from under you.

It’s a big bag. When you open it you think for a moment that it’s empty, despite its impossible weight: the light of your room seems to take seconds too long to penetrate the depths, an effect only enhanced by the dark clothes and stupid hats Vriska’s packed into it.

You push aside a frilly coat; and find, nestled between white globe and hook, the hidebound front of a most ancient journal.

“Oh,” you say softly. You could laugh. Vriska is watching you with triumph in her shoulders, and you, you are as happy as could be. “Wow. I thought you said you were never showing this to me, Vriska-- sorry, should that be Spinneret?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Well. Me too.”

Out it slides. The personal account of Marquise Mindfang, who according to Vriska knew a troll who bore your sign. You have just enough detachment to think, Pretty stupid thing to get worked up over! Since your hand is fondling the spine like a barkbeast humping a shinbone, it lacks some emphasis. But in your favor, you don’t yet open the book. Here is Vriska, tall and angry, feeling wronged because you have in friendship consigned her back to the role into which she was hatched; and here is her spiteful reply, on your knee, the full enumeration of who you could have been. Beyond the window it is still not yet dawn.

How funny, you think. That even Vriska should have this piece of you you don’t yet know. You feel grateful. All the world might be conspiring to tell you what you are, and it would probably feel a lot like this, the springy mass of condensed paper under hand, the gray light whitening. You shut your eyes, just for a moment; the natural dramatic sense that is a prosecutor’s best friend coming as ever to your speedy aid. You think perhaps you can hear your lusus-- or else that’s just the breathy huff of your own cautious brain.

Then you open the journal. You set yourself to read.


End file.
